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NDP leader Thomas Mulcair shares a great deal of Trudeau’s objections to the populist, culture war wedge-driving that Stephen Harper has put to the Conservatives’ advantage, especially in the NDP’s Quebec bastions. But it isn’t just elocution coaching and a proper haircut that has enabled Trudeau to so quickly shunt Mulcair back into the third-place showing where the New Democrats have historically languished. Something else has been going on.

Trudeau’s Liberal party is not the grand old project that had its final 13-year run in power with Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin and then thrashed around during the post-2006 Opposition years under Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. The old party was finished by the 2011 Liberal nadir of 34 seats in the House of Commons and its replacement by the NDP as Official Opposition.

The NDP’s rise, meanwhile, had a lot less to do with Jack Layton’s mystical powers than with a Blood Moon anomaly in Quebec, when busloads of untested NDP candidates found themselves with an open run at the rich pastures vacated by the collapsed Bloc Québécois. What Trudeau has accomplished makes the NDP’s 2011 triumph look like a mere lottery win.

Trudeau’s celebrity had a lot to do with it in the early innings. But it is his guileless charisma that has mobilized more than 300,000 Liberals to turn the tables on the NDP, and most of these people are new recruits. They’re Trudeau’s most loyal and hardcore activists and campaigners now. By way of contrast, during Thomas Mulcair’s bid to win the NDP leadership in 2012, the NDP brass was boasting that the party’s 128,351 federal card-carriers represented “historic” and “massive” numbers, evidence that “Canadians are really engaged and involved in our leadership race… Jack would be proud.”