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He could hardly deny that the party’s campaign was a mess, not just poorly executed but fundamentally misconceived. When you start with upward of 30 per cent of the vote and finish with less than 20, something has clearly gone dreadfully wrong. Had Mulcair not acknowledged this (“I agree … that our campaign came up short”) and accepted the responsibility that is and must be his as party leader, he would have struck party members as dangerously out of touch, if not delusional.

And yet as frank and confessional as the letter was meant to sound, there was one lesson Mulcair could not possibly draw: that he himself may have been part of the problem. Where Mulcair ruefully acknowledges “I could have done a better job,” many New Democrats may conclude he is flattering himself. The problem, that is, may not be that he signed off on the wrong strategy or took the party too far to the right or, as he has lately tried to maintain, because of his position on the niqab. It may simply be that, on a personal level, he does not connect with Canadians — not, at any rate, on a par with Justin Trudeau.

That he did not do so this time is not in doubt. The question facing New Democrats, rather, is whether he is any more likely to in future. It may not be enough to save his job to promise that “the mistakes of the campaign will never be repeated,” if enough party members decide the mistake was him.

Certainly he will not be given the benefit of the doubt. Other party leaders might be able to draw upon deep wellsprings of loyalty built up over many years in the trenches. And though none of them could claim to have won an election, in the sense that they did not form a government, party members could in most cases console themselves that they “fought the good fight,” standing up for the party’s core beliefs even in a losing cause.