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If the NDP’s Ottawa braintrust has any brains, it’ll ask Che Marville to explain what went so spectacularly wrong on October 19.

I spoke to Ms. Marville and another defeated NDP candidate (who asked not to be identified) after Tom Mulcair announced last week that he plans to set up a committee to examine how and why the party went from having a realistic shot at power back to holding down third place in the Commons … again.

Ms. Marville — who campaigned valiantly but unsuccessfully for a seat in the notoriously NDP-unfriendly suburb of Oakville, Ontario — and the unnamed Toronto-area candidate were still recovering from their own taxing defeats when I spoke to them earlier this week. The interview was a kind of “mini-committee” exploring the NDP’s collapse. Both candidates seemed happy to tell me they don’t plan to run for office again.

Ms. Marville and her fellow candidate agreed that the party needs to conduct a thorough post-mortem review of what the Toronto candidate called a “disastrous” campaign — a real review, willing to name names and assign blame. “It can’t be a whitewash,” the ex-candidate said. “Otherwise, it won’t be of any use at all.”

Both also agreed that, despite the thrashing the NDP received, Mulcair is a bright, talented politician who could be a fine — even transformative — prime minister. Neither believes that Mulcair should resign … although they concede that in politics circumstances often change unexpectedly, and the NDP leader could be forced to step down in the unlikely event party members suddenly sour on him.

(Mulcair got a little taste of the challenges he might face keeping his job last week at the national convention of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Vancouver, where the applause lines in his speech about holding the new Liberal government to account reportedly received a rather tepid response.)

In any event, both former candidates believe that Mulcair was carrying hard-won momentum into the election campaign and that the party and its leader were armed with a “progressive” platform — notably the call for a national child-care program — that should have been enough to put the party over the top.

But all that political spadework was squandered, in large part, because Mulcair permitted himself (or was convinced by his close advisers) to position the NDP as a ‘centrist’ alternative that could govern the country ‘responsibly,’ instead of offering voters a robust and convincing defence of the NDP’s core principles.

‘Our challenge was not so much to defeat Stephen Harper, but to repair the damage Stephen Harper had done to the country. The national campaign didn’t hear or listen to what we were constantly hearing while I was canvassing door-to-door. The Liberals did.’ — NDP candidate Che Marville ‘Our challenge was not so much to defeat Stephen Harper, but to repair the damage Stephen Harper had done to the country. The national campaign didn’t hear or listen to what we were constantly hearing while I was canvassing door-to-door. The Liberals did.’ — NDP candidate Che Marville

It didn’t help, of course, that the 11-week election campaign was dominated by the corporate media’s predictable preoccupation with polls, with collecting scalps from moronic, media-inept candidates, and with hot-button distractions like the niqab — at the expense of far more urgent issues like income inequality, child poverty and climate change.

Still, both candidates agreed that Mulcair and the team around him made strategic errors that turned out to be fatal.

“I think their big mistake was they didn’t believe in the value of being authentic. I think when you’re scripted and always on message, you lose the opportunity to connect with people,” Ms. Marville said.

As a result, said the Toronto candidate, the passionate, “angry” Tom who connected with Canadians’ outrage over Harper morphed into “tepid and much less interesting and compelling Tom.”

“I think Mr. Mulcair was trying to present himself in a way that said, ‘I’m a pragmatist. You can trust me. I’m careful. I’m not going to be a wild card,’” Ms. Marville said. “The national campaign should have been centered instead on being as truthful and authentic about what your values are and what you … envision for the future for the country.”

Trudeau, on the other hand, appeared to have understood and channelled — at least rhetorically — the visceral, potent desire of Canadians not only for change, but for an effort to reclaim the Canada that had been fading away under nine years of Harper government — a desire both candidates encountered daily on the doorsteps.

“Our challenge was not so much to defeat Stephen Harper, but to repair the damage Stephen Harper had done to the country. The national campaign didn’t hear or listen to what we were constantly hearing while I was canvassing door-to-door. The Liberals did,” Ms. Marville said.

The Toronto candidate bluntly said that it was unforgivable of Mulcair and his strategists to cede the ‘change agent’ mantle to an “empty suit” like Trudeau who won’t fundamentally change the country’s economic and political power structures.

Rather than playing defence to blunt trumped-up worries about the NDP’s economic acumen, the candidates said Mulcair should have spent the entire campaign bringing the fight directly to Harper.

Finally, both candidates told me they don’t expect to be contacted by Mulcair’s ‘fact-finding’ committee to share their views on what went wrong in depth and detail. As if to prove the point, Ms. Marville received a short questionnaire yesterday by email from NDP campaign chair Anne McGrath — which was sent to all NDP members — asking her “to provide your feedback in our plans for the coming months.”

How nice.

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.