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Here’s what would make far more sense, at this juncture: leave Mulcair alone. He’s earned that. Let him step aside or not step aside, in his own time. Let him do what he does best, which is to ask pointed questions in the House of Commons in the session to come. While he does this, throw your intellectual and emotional energies into deciding who you are.

“But we know who we are,” NDP partisans will mutter. “We are a social democratic party. We are the party that upholds the interests of workers. We are the party of the little guy.”

Except that’s balderdash. You were handed a historic opportunity last spring, in the person of Alberta’s NDP premier, Rachel Notley, to uphold the interests of workers and the little guy. Notley explicitly asked for your support in her efforts to get her province’s workers back on the job in the resource sector, in a way that is environmentally responsible.

Yet you repudiated her by embracing Leap, as surely as you did Mulcair. Unemployment in Alberta is now closing in on nine per cent, compared with seven per cent nationally. The federal Liberals are getting nowhere on pipelines. It is a problem you can still seize.

Here’s how that could look: the federal NDP, at the caucus level, embraces Notley’s project, symbolically turning back the clock on last spring’s disaster

Here’s how that could look: the federal NDP, at the caucus level, embraces Notley’s project, symbolically turning back the clock on last spring’s disaster.

It shouldn’t be so hard, given that she remains NDP royalty and her chief of staff, Topp, was runner-up to Mulcair for the leadership in 2012. These links re-established, the federal NDP then gets solidly behind the idea of a national west-east pipeline, which was its go-to energy proposal before the Keystone XL project ran afoul of the Obama administration.