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It seems like only yesterday that New Democrats were entertaining utopian convention resolutions about Venezuela, but as that socialist paradise has turned into a barely functioning police state, even international left-wing icon Desmond Tutu is publicly expressing disgust about what has become of that country’s economic experiment. All the “Bolivarian” New Democrats have gone quiet lately.

All this leaves Mulcair’s New Democrats looking comparatively sensible and sober. It helps as well as hinders the NDP that the party has never held power federally. It has helped a great deal that it is only in the past few days that the reliance of the NDP caucus on sovereigntist constituencies in Quebec — home to 54 of the NDP’s 95 MPs, where until recently there wasn’t even one — has come into sharper focus.

The NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration (which states that a future Quebec referendum only needs a 50-per-cent-plus-one majority for separation talks to begin) was a holdover from the NDP’s more “radical” past, even when the declaration was adopted in 2005, and it’s going to sting, if Justin Trudeau has anything to do with it. It’s the ghosts of the NDP’s 1970s era that Mulcair’s team is going to have to keep locked in their crypts.

It’s plain luck that the NDP hasn’t been embarrassed by any major eruptions from the party’s “socialist caucus” lately. In 2013, the caucus made a scene at the NDP convention in Montreal, carrying banners protesting U.S. President Barack Obama’s “drone wars” in Pakistan, arguing against the inclusion of U.S. Democratic Party speakers on the conference agenda and protesting the amendment to the party constitution that removed any explicit reference to the NDP as a “socialist” party. Delegates voted 960 to 188 to change the constitution’s preamble to refer only to the NDP’s democratic socialist, feminist, labour and farmer traditions.