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Mulcair vowed to fight a free trade bloc stretching from Chile to Japan, the largest deal of its kind in Canadian history — because, well, Unifor did some back-of-the-napkin math and said it would kill 20,000 auto jobs. Probably.

“The NDP is going to be standing up against this trade deal because it’s going to be hurting Canadian families…If elected, Canada will not be part of an agreement that removes 20,000 Canadian jobs,” Mulcair said, happily oblivious to how many new jobs might be created by an agreement that would grant Canadian exporters better access to 40 per cent of the global economy. Or, for that matter, how many such jobs might be lost if Canada were to find itself economically isolated in a hemisphere that is becoming less so.

There may, in fact, be legitimate criticism to levied against the TPP, we’ll know more in coming weeks. But the NDP’s instinctive protectionism should give anyone pause about the party’s ability to run a country for more than just the good of a narrow subset of unionized workers who happen to comprise its loyal base.

The notion that auto workers should be so uniquely privileged at the expense of everyone else may not enjoy much economic rationale, but to the NDP’s credit, it is at least ideologically consistent.

There is no such excuse for Stephen Harper.

That’s because the TPP represented this country’s best opportunity in a generation to abolish one of our most regressive economic policies: One that has created a price-fixing cartel that jacks up the cost of everyday essentials to ensure above-average wages for a small handful of privileged businesspeople.