VANCOUVER

The federal NDP is celebrating 50 years of existence this weekend but also a half a century of consistent electoral failures.

Until last month’s election, it had sat in a corner twice-removed from the government side of the House of Commons for five decades, comforting itself in the notion that its real purpose was to be the conscience of Parliament.

That may have been true in the party’s early years but one has to go back to the 1960s and ’70s to find major national policies that bear the NDP imprint.

The evidence suggests that even in its new elevated capacity of official Opposition, the party will never achieve the same level on influence on a government inclined to deconstruct the country’s federal infrastructure as it did on those that built it.

Only a party stuck for so long in the wilderness would see trading the balance of power in a minority Parliament for the impotence of acting as official Opposition across from a majority Conservative government as a great leap forward for a progressive Canada.

The NDP could be celebrating empty victories for a few more decades if it misleads itself as to the limits of what it achieved on May 2 or the aspirations of its latest supporters.

If it had not been for Quebec, the NDP’s 50th anniversary convention would have been more of a wake than a birthday party.

But when all is said and done, the source of the NDP’s Quebec breakthrough can be summed up with just two words — Jack Layton — and his success in connecting with Quebec voters.

Until further notice, that connection is more personal than partisan.

Even more than Stephen Harper, who has towered over the Conservatives since they reunited, Layton is now a bigger winner for his party than the NDP brand is.

Many of the Quebecers who supported the party for the first time last month bring a strikingly different perspective to some fundamental tenets of modern NDP dogma.

To most Quebec voters, for instance, medicare is not an icon, just a social program that needs some fixing.

Many of them supported Brian Mulroney’s 1988 free-trade accord with the United States and the subsequent NAFTA agreement. Few think the 1982 patriation of the Constitution was cause for celebration.

Beyond their attraction to Layton, their connection to the NDP is based on their collective desire for a progressive federal government.

On that basis, there is no place where the concept of a formal rapprochement between the Liberals and the NDP is more popular than Quebec.

The notion that it would be akin to trying to fit the head of a giraffe on the legs of an elephant has little traction in a province where the main faces of the NDP, beyond that of Layton, have been those of former Liberals such as Thomas Mulcair and Françoise Boivin.

Quebecers are hardly alone in their interest for a coming-together of the Liberals and the NDP. Polls have shown that non-Conservative voters are generally more sympathetic to the idea than the two parties that purport to represent their views in the Commons.

Since the election, the federal Liberal establishment has gone out of its way to ward off talk of a rapprochement with the NDP.

At the same time the election result has convinced many New Democrats that they can go it alone. On Sunday, the convention will be asked to support a resolution designed to shut the door to any merger with the Liberals.

Yet, when all is said and done, nothing would divide the Liberal grassroots more than an offer of cooperation from the NDP.

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Now that it is in the driver’s seat, wisdom would at least suggest that the NDP road-test its new status before foreclosing the option of going down the road of an arrangement with the Liberals.

As anyone who has tried to take the keys out of the hands of a drunken friend, there is nothing harder than to inject some sobriety into the revelry of a big party.

But then, looking at the boarded-up storefronts of downtown Vancouver this weekend, one is reminded that the aftermath of a premature celebration is more often than not a major hangover.

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