Federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair joins Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath onstage at the Ontario New Democrats meeting in Hamilton, Ont., Apr. 15, 2012.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sheryl Nadler

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The NDP and its predecessor the CCF have won 25 provincial elections in Canada and governed for a total of roughly 95 years. When provincial New Democrats have been elected, they have — more often than not — been re-elected, meaning that by and large voters thought they governed reasonably well.

New Democrats are proud of that record — not least because in many cases the governments they’ve led, especially in their Prairie heartland of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, also had a record of fiscal probity.

And federal New Democrats think that provincial record should allay concerns about putting them in power in Ottawa for the first time.

But all that means precisely nothing in Ontario — where most of the votes and most of the seats are.

The media often frame Tom Mulcair’s challenge as a popularity contest with Justin Trudeau. The problem with that frame is that, by some measures anyway, Canadians rank Mulcair’s qualities as a leader on a par with Trudeau’s.

If Mulcair is ever to become prime minister, he needs to do something that may be even harder than contending with Trudeau; he will have to address the suspicions Ontarians harbour about both the NDP’s policies and its raw competence.

As we all know, that’s largely the legacy of Bob Rae’s ill-fated NDP government in the 1990s.

Rae, to be sure, inherited a recession and contended with a federal government determined to bring him low. But he also made a bad miscalculation that he could stimulate the province out of the recession. What Ontarians remember about those years are a bad economy, terrifying deficits, spending cuts, ‘Rae Days’ and brutal warfare between the government and the NDP’s union brothers and sisters.

Superficially, you would think the new-model provincial NDP led by Andrea Horwath would be helpful to Mulcair in his quest to erase those memories.

Andrea Horwath’s appeal is based largely on a nebulous populism which undermines Mulcair’s attempt to portray the federal NDP as a party of grown-ups prepared to govern.

Although the provincial party is currently third in the polls, it looked strong in byelections last year and Horwath is often said to be the most popular among the three provincial party leaders. Some even give her a shot at winning a minority government if there’s a provincial election this spring.

So in the federal NDP’s sunny scenario, maybe Horwath becomes premier and goes on to lead a competent, popular government. By the time of the 2015 federal election, Rae is forgotten, all is forgiven, and the path is opened for Mulcair.

That’s the sunny scenario.

The problem is that Horwath’s appeal is based largely on a nebulous populism which undermines Mulcair’s attempt to portray the federal NDP as a party of grown-ups prepared to govern.

When asked about the sketchiness of her party’s taxation and spending plans, Horwath essentially says that all will be revealed in an election campaign. This is odd, given that the party negotiated a budget deal with the Liberal government just last year.

When a provincial panel recently made the anodyne point that the big transit infrastructure investments the province (and particularly Toronto) desperately needs will have to be paid for somehow, Horwath loudly proclaimed her opposition to any such thing.

Indeed, Horwath has a Rob Ford-ish love affair with the car, always looking for ways to making driving easier — whether it’s lower auto insurance premiums or cheaper prices at the pump.

In the course of her swoon, she has lost the thread of environmentalism that needs to be part of Mulcair’s progressive appeal in places such as Quebec and British Columbia, as well as Ontario.

Whatever their past successes, provincial New Democratic parties have not been much help to Mulcair since he became leader. In B.C., the party lost an election it should have won. In Nova Scotia, the party lost power. And in Manitoba, the country’s lone remaining NDP government is trailing the provincial Progressive Conservatives by a mind-boggling 22 percentage points.

When Tom Mulcair took the job, nobody said it would be easy.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

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