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The post-electoral arrangement between Trudeau and Lewis had important implications for Canadian political history, as the NDP played the economic nationalist card and pushed Trudeau to introduce the Foreign Investment Review Agency and create Petro-Canada as a Crown corporation.

The impetus for this trip down memory lane is that Jagmeet Singh and his team appear to have dusted off the 1972 NDP playbook.

Singh’s message is that New Democrats will offer a “New Deal for People,” reversing the trend where governments in Ottawa help the rich to get richer, while everyone else falls back. Liberals and Conservatives have “given the people at the top whatever they want and we’re paying the price,” he says, gouged by cell phone companies, while big polluters have been let off the hook.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

It’s tired old class warfare rhetoric familiar to anyone who has followed Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. But there are signs that Singh’s ability to divide the population along income lines, while at the same time calling for people to “move past prejudice” is starting to resonate.

In an Angus Reid Institute survey released Wednesday, Singh is the most favoured leader, receiving more positive than negative appraisals from voters. That has not yet been reflected in horse race numbers. When voters are asked who they would vote for if the election were held tomorrow, the New Democrats are still mired at 14 per cent support. But ARI noted vote intentions on the centre-left remains extremely fluid. While most Conservative voters say they are locked in, one quarter of Liberals and New Democrats say they could switch to another party. Singh has already made his pitch to those voters. “You don’t have to settle for less,” he said during a press conference at a farmer’s market in Montreal, ahead of the first leaders’ debate to feature Justin Trudeau Wednesday night.