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It will be something of a surprise if Thomas Mulcair intends to stay on indefinitely as leader of the New Democrats, and if his party — dragged to starboard to great effect under former leader Jack Layton and now pondering the effective limits of that move — consents. John Turner is the last federal party leader to survive losing as many or more seats as the NDP lost on Oct. 20. I think disinterested Canadians should hope Mulcair sticks around, though. He was never more praised than for his performance in Question Period, and the platform the Liberals bring to Ottawa is going to produce a few queries here and there.

They have, after all, pledged to “save home mail delivery”; to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end; to modify anti-terror laws in a way that satisfies civil libertarians and to implement more robust national security oversight; to ditch the F-35s and find cheaper fighter jets somewhere; to legalize and regulate marijuana; to table electoral reform legislation within 18 months; to restore the retirement age to 65; to comprehensively reform access-to-information procedures; to appoint an advertising commissioner to decide whether government ads are partisan; to “establish an independent commission to organize leaders’ debates”; to reform Senate and Supreme Court appointments; to allow MPs free votes on everything except platform items, “traditional confidence matters” and matters pertaining to “our shared values and the protections guaranteed by the Charter”; to alter the House of Commons’ standing orders to prohibit mammoth omnibus bills; to empower and enrich the Parliamentary Budget Office and to extend its purview to parties’ election platforms; to make government accounting “consistent and clear”; to restore the mandatory long-form census; to establish “a pan-Canadian framework for combating climate change” within 90 days of the Paris conference; to “renew Canada’s commitment to peacekeeping operations”; and to “enact the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” which at the federal level means calling an inquiry into missing and murdered women, adopting and implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, “eliminating the overrepresentation of aboriginal people in custody over the next decade,” closing the aboriginal educational achievement gap in a single generation, building a Residential Schools National Monument in Ottawa, “restoring and increasing” funding for CBC, statutorily exempting criminals suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome from all mandatory minimum sentences, having new citizens swear observance to treaties with indigenous peoples and outlawing spanking.