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This may feel like a slight overreaction to watching Tom Mulcair get ice-picked live in Edmonton on Sunday, but here’s a question: what are political parties for, now, exactly? In the run-up to the devastating leadership-review vote against Mulcair, whose enormity almost nobody seems to have predicted, I kept doing sums in my head. Let’s see, there are hundreds of Alberta NDP members here who mostly dislike Mulcair. The labour unions seem divided at best, with the leadership of the Canadian Labour Congress not only opposing him, but saying they warned him of disaster.

There are plenty of defectors, open and half-hidden, in Mulcair’s caucus. The Leap Manifesto people don’t like him and neither do the hardcore socialists. The youth wing of the party had to be wheedled into presenting an appearance of 50-50 support. Who, exactly, is for this guy?

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After a strong vote in favour of “discussing” the Leap Manifesto, which infuriated the Alberta contingent and had unionized industrial workers panicking, the question may be: is there a New Democratic Party at all? Yes, there are institutional trappings of an NDP — a national executive, a parliamentary caucus. The NDP as an organic whole, united to pursue agreed ends: that seems to be over, doesn’t it?