MONTREAL

For a disquieting sense of how the country’s political discourse may be headed further downhill, NDP strategist Brian Topp’s post-mortem on the party’s recent defeat in British Columbia is a must-read.

His recently-leaked autopsy of the New Democrat campaign that he ran in B.C. last spring reads like a reluctant renunciation of the notion that elections should feature an intelligent conversation among party leaders, the media and the electorate.

It also suggests that Jack Layton’s impact on Canada’s political culture will not outlast him — or at least not within his own political family.

In short, Topp makes the case that if NDP leader Adrian Dix had campaigned more like Stephen Harper and less like Layton, the party might not have seen a solid pre-election lead on the ruling B.C. Liberals melt away on election night.

He of course does not present it as bluntly as I’ve just put it but his recommendations would ultimately see the New Democrats embrace much of the federal Conservative approach to electoral politics.

Looking at the B.C. campaign in the rear-view mirror, Topp writes: “The Liberals prosecuted us better than we prosecuted them.” He concludes that sticking to a positive mantra contributed greatly to the party’s undoing. “We must do a much more effective job of discrediting opponents each and every day of the campaign,” he prescribes for the future.

Topp also advocates a more bare-bones repetitive message, backed by strictly enforced talking points and limited media access.

As an aside, those who doubted that the tears the federal opposition parties have been shedding over Harper’s controlling approach to the parliamentary press were of the crocodile variety will be brought back to their senses by this memo.

Not only does Topp recommend that campaign encounters between the leader and the media be “brief and rare” but he adds that they “should be managed with a ‘chair’ to assign questions and a strict limit on the number of questions.”

What makes his analysis both compelling and dispiriting is that Topp was one of the leading architects of the federal campaign that resulted in the NDP wave that swept Quebec two years ago.

Layton spent little time belittling the Conservatives or his opposition rivals in Quebec in 2011 and his message stood out because it struck a rare positive note in an otherwise poisoned environment.

In the wake of that breakthrough, there was speculation that Layton’s success might bring some traffic back to the increasingly less-travelled political high road. In fact, it is a parade that the NDP is less and less likely to lead.

Two years ago Topp ran against Thomas Mulcair for Layton’s succession. He is not a member of the current leader’s inner circle. But there is little doubt that his hard-earned experience in B.C. is helping shape the federal party’s thinking or that his prescriptions are in sync with Mulcair’s own read of the landscape.

In Quebec in 2011, there was no need for an aggressive prosecution of the Conservatives. The public’s negative verdict against the Harper government was already in and it was without appeal.

But outside Quebec the opposition has yet to make a decisive case against the Harper Conservatives. More importantly the Liberals under Justin Trudeau pose a mortal threat to the ambitions of the federal NDP in and outside Quebec that the party cannot afford to ignore.

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And so there is mounting evidence that upcoming federal byelections in Toronto Centre and Bourassa will provide trial runs for a more aggressive, take-no-prisoner NDP style. It is an approach that suits Mulcair’s combative instincts. He may have started life as a Liberal but fighting federal Liberals has always come easily to their Quebec cousins.

It remains to be seen what Canadians will make of the NDP’s transition to a more cutthroat style especially as the party will first road test it on Liberals and not on Conservatives. On that score Topp’s most depressing conclusion may be his suggestion that by now voters expect no better from competing parties.

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