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On election day, the NDP dream of forming government in 2015 dissolved. The party finished with 19.7 per cent of the popular vote, lost 59 seats and once more found itself with third-party status. The Ottawa Citizen’s Ian MacLeod talked with NDP Leader Tom Mulcair about where he and the social democrats go from here.

Q: After the highs and lows of the last five months, and now some private criticisms within the party over the election results, why do you still want this job?

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A: The NDP is a party of profound values, we want to make sure we can build a country where nobody’s left behind. I don’t accept as inevitable that in a country as wealthy as Canada, that hundreds of thousands of kids should be going to school hungry. Remove the CEO stock-option tax loophole, take those 500 million bucks and help eliminate child poverty.

I don’t accept that we have Third World conditions on Canada’s First Nations’ reserves. We have over 100 reserves with permanent boil-water advisories in a country that has the largest fresh water resource in the world. That’s a scandal. The Liberals said they were going to eliminate every single one of those boil water advisories permanently by the end of their first mandate and I will be the first to congratulate them if they actually do it. But now we need to see a plan and a timeline and that’s where we (the NDP) come in.