With the Conservative and NDP leadership races now underway, sharp contrasts can be drawn. And out of the two, the NDP may become the serious alternative to the Liberals in 2019.

Three NDP competitors – Peter Julian from Burnaby, Charlie Angus from Timmins and Guy Caron from Rimouski – are now vying for their party’s top job. Two more candidates may enter soon – Manitoba MP Niki Ashton and Ontario MPP Jagmeet Singh.

The NDP race promises to be a tight affair. The central task for Julian, Angus and Caron will be to fuse their party’s economic, environmental, democratic and equality ambitions into a compelling vision of Canada. Whoever can best achieve that wins the prize.

In contrast, the Conservative contest is a gong show. With an unwieldy cast of 14 mostly unqualified candidates, media attention goes to those who say and do dumb things. That dynamic has propelled Kellie Leitch and Kevin O’Leary to front-runner status.

The resulting mass disaster has divided the Conservative Party. It is unable to constrain its chauvinistic impulses. Even simple tests of decency, like condemning religious discrimination, have turned into politically devastating traps.

A parasitic faction is feeding on the party’s legacy and emitting toxic identity politics. And nobody has the power – or perhaps cares enough – to hit the gong and send home the collective kool-aid chugging party.

While someone is going to win the battle, the Conservative Party has already lost the war. To the degree the Conservatives embrace the tumult of identity politics, they surrender the image of strong, stable economic management so carefully honed by old Conservatives. And that surrender allows the Trudeau Liberals to win most-favoured guest status with the C-suites of corporate Canada.

Trudeau’s pipeline boosterism is a bottomless well for Calgary oil investors. His private infrastructure bank is a steady rent stream for financiers on Bay Street and Wall Street. His BC energy mega-projects spread sunny ways over Vancouver’s Howe Street. His China overture is music to the ears of politicians running Montreal’s Power Corporation. Everybody, let’s make some money.

There’s no business concern Trudeau won’t front. And it’s all for you, the middle class – and those working hard to join it, of course.

Give a Trudeau smile, wear a buckskin jacket, frame a backdrop of women for Trump, sing with Brian Mulroney, capture it all in a selfie and – ka-blam – the Conservatives are unnecessary.

And also unnecessary – downright problematic – are all those promises made to suck votes from the NDP. Liberals won’t upset boardroom interests if, instead, they can float in the flow of power.

Well, unless voters revolt and the NDP starts heading up in the polls. Damn NDP, wrecking everything.

Electoral reform, tax fairness, infrastructure, quality jobs, health transfers, reconciliation – all unnecessary, all already broken promises. Used to be good for the middle class. Now not. Things changed. So sorry.

As the Conservative lemmings march off their cliff and the Liberals ensconce themselves in power, the most important political terrain in Canadian politics now goes unrepresented: the Canadian people.

And if Caron, Angus and Julian want to represent that vital turf, they’ll require discipline, self-confidence and big thinking unseen from the NDP since losing the last election. But somebody’s got to do it. Politics abhors a vacuum.

Tom Parkin is a former NDP staffer and social democrat media commentator.