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So it looks like Tom Mulcair and the New Democrats are headed for yet another ‘moral’ victory.

Improbably, the Peter Pan of Canadian politics, Justin Trudeau, now has the momentum, the polls and much of the media (if you’re keeping score on those silly, anachronistic editorial endorsements) in his corner. Right now, it’s looking increasingly likely that, by early next week, Trudeau Jr. will be moving back into 24 Sussex Drive.

For the once-cocky Mulcair and his equally confident handlers, it wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Heading into this election, Mulcair and his party were sitting rather comfortably atop the polls and much of the corporate media — so impressed by the NDP leader’s measured, prosecutorial performances during question period — were praising “Angry Tom” for turning himself into “Tepid Tom.”

But if there’s one thing the corporate media craves above all, it’s the status quo. And as far as they were concerned, not even a well-scrubbed, time-share socialist like Tom Mulcair could ever be trusted with the keys to the car, let alone the PMO.

Trudeau Jr. could be 21 and a high school dropout for all the mainstream media cares. He’s a Liberal and that makes him a safe, reliable ‘alternative’ to Darth Harper. The MSM also knows that Trudeau isn’t going to repeal Bill C-51, tinker with the TPP or appoint a finance minister who will do anything at all to trouble Bay Street.

In other words, he can be trusted not to do a damn thing about the very issues — child poverty, income inequality, unemployment and climate change — that the horserace-obsessed media doesn’t really give a damn about either. Essentially, Trudeau Jr. is Stephen Harper without all the really nasty elements, and that makes him not only palatable, but much more electable than Tepid Tom.

Still, I’m convinced that Mulcair and his backroom strategists actually believed all the obsequious tripe the establishment press was writing and saying about him in the lead-up to this election. Suckers.

Rank and file New Democrats have started grumbling softly about how they managed, again, to come so close without closing the deal. Did Harper’s embrace of sleazy identity politics kill their chances in Quebec? Sadly, that’s part of the story — but it’s not all of it, not by a long shot. Rank and file New Democrats have started grumbling softly about how they managed, again, to come so close without closing the deal. Did Harper’s embrace of sleazy identity politics kill their chances in Quebec? Sadly, that’s part of the story — but it’s not all of it, not by a long shot.

Mulcair tried so hard and for so long to not be Angry Tom that he ended up turning into a quiet, cautious Humpty Tommy … so scared of making a mistake, of falling off the wall of public opinion, that he forgot about what got him to front-runner status in the first place — his passion, his intellect, his unwillingness to suffer fools. Now he and his campaign are in pieces and it’s too late to put it all back together again. A new round of ads featuring Mulcair perched on a mahogany desk in sun-drenched, book-lined office — looking every inch a slick slip-and-fall attorney rather than a democratic socialist — won’t turn the tide.

For his part, Mulcair is pretending he has (or is hallucinating about) prospects of winning a majority. During his more lucid moments, Mulcair has been musing publicly about working in a coalition with Trudeau to keep Darth Harper from turning Canada into a larger version of Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, rank and file New Democrats have started grumbling softly about how they managed, again, to come so close without closing the deal. Did Harper’s embrace of sleazy identity politics kill their chances in Quebec? Sadly, that’s part of the story — but it’s not all of it, not by a long shot.

It certainly doesn’t explain how Mulcair, in his long, futile quest to convince voters that he’s a trustworthy centrist, let Trudeau outflank him (rhetorically, at least) on the left. While Trudeau has been loudly — but unconvincingly — embracing Keynesian economics, Mulcair has been running in the opposite direction.

“A government should never have the pretension of being able to replace the free market. It does not work. It didn’t work in England. Up until the time of Margaret Thatcher, that is what they tried, the government had its nose in everything. Interventionism is a failure,” Mulcair said in 2002, back when he was a Liberal member of the Quebec legislature. “… The best way for a government to create riches is to let the free market thrive and get off the backs of businessmen and women.”

Deal with it, Dippers. Muclair said it and he said it not too long ago. Maybe your guy is just a laissez-faire socialist, after all. The undeniable upshot of this is that Trudeau Jr. has become the so-called ‘change agent’ at a time when Mulcair, ironically, has been largely preaching the status quo on macroeconomic policy.

The whole business has given me (and a lot of other people, I suspect) a queasy sense of déjà vu. During the 1988 election, I looked on in disbelief as John Turner — the very type of a Bay Street nabob in a three-piece suit — miraculously transformed himself into the flag-bearer for the anti-free trade crowd, while NDP Leader Ed Broadbent tiptoed around his socialist credentials to prove that he also could be ‘trusted’ to govern ‘responsibly’.

Like Mulcair, Broadbent looked for a while like he was poised to make a historic electoral breakthrough. But he shied away from the moment instead of seizing it, opting for caution over bold deeds and words, trying to move to where Canadians were at the time rather than bringing them to where he was. He abandoned his political character, presenting himself as something he was not … and, in the process, freed up the Liberal establishment man to pretend to be something he was not — an agent of change.

In the end, Broadbent took comfort in winning what was, up to that time, a record number of seats for the party. It was a hollow victory. In politics, ‘moral’ victories usually are.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.