British Columbia’s election was many things. It was a referendum on a government already in place for 12 years. It was a vote on whether to forge ahead with all-out, natural gas resource development.

It was a choice between two flawed leaders with extensive political baggage, Liberal Premier Christy Clark and New Democrat challenger Adrian Dix. But it was also a test run for the new, moderate, incrementalist NDP — the NDP that, in its federal form, Jack Layton re-fashioned and Tom Mulcair inherited.

Indeed, three members of Layton’s brain trust — Brian Topp, Brad Lavigne and Anne McGrath — held key positions in the campaign.

So the fact that this new, moderate NDP managed to lose badly in B.C. — in spite of its early and overwhelming lead in the polls, in spite of voter fatigue with Clark’s Liberals — casts a long shadow.

Throughout the campaign, Dix did his best to reassure voters that the new New Democrats had been thoroughly defanged. Unlike the NDP governments of Dave Barrett in the 1970s and Glen Clark in the ’90s, he insisted it had no plans to do anything remarkable.

Barrett, B.C.’s first NDP premier, had remade the province during his brief three-year tenure, setting up public auto insurance, establishing rules to protect farm land and modernizing both education and health care.

Glen Clark, who resigned in 1999 under a cloud (which the courts later lifted), left less of lasting legacy. But his time, too, was marked by bold ambition and controversial decisions.

This time, however, the NDP was determined to portray itself as bland. Dix may have been Glen Clark’s chief of staff during the tumultuous ’90s. But his campaign motto this time was minimalist: “one practical step at a time.”

His promises — such as one to ensure that nursing home residents receive two rather than just one bath a week — were underwhelming.

It was at its core a strangely defensive campaign, as if the NDP were saying to voters: “We know you’re sick of the Liberals and wary of us. But don’t be frightened. You can vote for us without fear of our doing much.”

To that end, Dix presented himself in his stump speeches as soft-spoken, amiable and cautious. His message was: Under the NDP, things will change but only marginally.

The strategy didn’t work.

Across the country, New Democrats are hard at work analyzing the results. As federal NDP Leader Tom Mulcair told the Star editorial board Wednesday: “We’ve started to go through the debris to figure out what happened.”

But two things stand out.

First, the NDP can’t escape its own past. By any reasonable standard, it ceased to be a socialist party long ago. But no matter how many times it tries to purge its constitution of anti-capitalist language, a good many voters still view it as a party of the left.

Christy Clark’s Liberals seized on this. The entire thrust of their campaign was to attack the NDP not as it portrayed itself in 2013 but as it had been in 1998 or 1974.

My guess is that the New Democrats nationally will run into the same problem during the 2015 federal election campaign. It will be difficult to convince those who mistrust left-wing parties that the new, moderate NDP has changed its spots.

Second, by focusing on incrementalism, Dix gave B.C. voters few positive reasons to vote NDP. The centrepiece of the party platform was the worthy issue of skills training. But Clark’s Liberals offered education goodies, too.

Andrea Horwath’s Ontario New Democrats, who prefer equally bite-size pieces of practical policy to broad vision might want to reflect on Dix’s failure here.

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On Tuesday, B.C. voters were left with two negative questions: Did they hate the Liberals enough to get rid of them? Or did they fear the New Democrats enough to avoid them?

In the end, they chose fear over hate.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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