A political party is a family — and in the NDP, Tom Mulcair is a son-in-law. As he has discovered since the election, it’s one thing to marry into the family, quite another to keep the in-laws happy.

Many of them don’t like the way Mulcair, a political transplant from the Quebec Liberals, has been running the family business. They weren’t happy with the revamped product line offered in the election. And they’re going to say so at the mandatory leadership review at the party’s biennial convention in Edmonton this weekend.

Mulcair is rather like a CEO facing a bit of a shareholder revolt at the annual meeting; he just needs to get through it. All he needs, according to the rules, is 50 per cent plus one. In the real world, he needs to be somewhere in the 60s, preferably at the higher end. (Mulcair himself has been quoted as saying he thinks he need a 70 per cent result to give him the authority to stay on, but there seems to be some confusion out there about whether the man himself mentioned a 70 per cent threshold.)

Edmonton isn’t that easy to get to, and it isn’t a cheap flight, either. But party officials are expecting a high turnout of 1,500 delegates. Mulcair needs about 1,000 supporters on the convention floor. At this point, no one really knows whether he’s there yet. Says one top NDP strategist, “It feels like the mid-60s.”

The Broadbent Institute’s annual Progress Summit in Ottawa last weekend offered a close up of the party’s mood. The cocktail chatter and corridor conversations were largely about the leadership review.

Overheard at the hotel bar: “If I’m going to dump someone, I want to know who is going to replace him.” That’s a very good point.

If Mulcair were to step aside, who would be in the running? Nathan Cullen from British Columbia would be one obvious possibility. Megan Leslie would be another, even though she lost her Nova Scotia seat in the Liberal sweep of Atlantic Canada. She has star quality, she would represent generational change and she’s perfectly bilingual. Niki Ashton from Manitoba ran against Mulcair in the 2012 leadership race, has kept her own counsel on the leadership review, and probably would be a contender this time as well.

At the Broadbent gathering of the NDP clan, quite a bit of anger was still evident, especially among defeated candidates. And not just about Mulcair dragging the party from the left to the centre of the political spectrum, but equally about the cautious conduct of the campaign itself.

In politics, as in hockey, the worst thing you can do is sit on a lead. In politics, as in hockey, the worst thing you can do is sit on a lead.

One defeated candidate from the Toronto region wondered aloud: “Until the election was called, Mulcair was taking all kinds of questions and doing very well. Then on the first day, he took none, and walked away from the podium. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Justin Trudeau stood there and took as many questions as reporters wanted to ask.”

And then Mulcair took the next day off. Then, rather than barnstorming the country, Mulcair launched a tour that was more of a stately procession.

In politics, as in hockey, the worst thing you can do is sit on a lead.

“It was a classic front-runner’s campaign,” said one former MP who supported Mulcair for the leadership four years ago. One former stalwart of the Ed Broadbent era put it another way:

“It was a risk-averse campaign. It wasn’t that Mulcair was outflanked on the left. It was the aversion to risk.”

Trudeau’s campaign wasn’t risk-averse. He took a huge gamble in promising stimulative deficits — which proved to be the game-changer in the election, differentiating the Liberals from the NDP and winning the ballot question of change. Meanwhile, Mulcair was aligned with the Conservatives in promising balanced budgets. This did not pass unnoticed with the NDP’s base on the left.

Nor did it go unnoticed, less than two weeks before the election, when Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein and kindred spirits on the left issued their Leap Manifesto on the environment, clean energy and Indigenous peoples, with the obligatory denunciation of free trade.

This came at a bad moment for Mulcair. Just when he needed to reverse the slide in his campaign, the Toronto-based movement leftists appeared to be deserting the cause.

And while Mulcair had been a dominant parliamentary figure who regularly demolished the Conservatives in question period, it was never clear that the voters would hand the country over to the guy holding the knife to the government’s throat. But at least Angry Tom — the guy in the House — was authentic. Happy Tom, the guy who turned up for the leaders’ debates, was not.

The one spot in the campaign where Mulcair passed the authenticity test was the release of his book, Strength of Conviction. The first half of the book was a revelation — a page-turner about growing up in a big family in Montreal, meeting and falling in love with his wife Catherine, working his way through university and law school with summer jobs that included roofing.

It was a moving story, and it offered him a chance to present a campaign narrative more in tune with who he is, where he came from and his hopes and dreams for our country.

It would be good to hear from that guy this weekend. It certainly couldn’t do him any harm.

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