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The way NDP soul-searching tends to unfold, to the extent that it happens at all, is usually along the lines of having to put up with dreary old placard-carriers demanding that the NDP return to its more radical socialist roots, which were never particularly deep or radical to begin with, but it’s folly for a couple of big reasons.

The first is that there isn’t much traction to be had in a program that would require hapless NDP candidates to attempt to charm their way into the affections of the working class by traducing Canada as a racist colonial settler state one minute and demanding a bigger and more intrusive role for the state the next. The second is that the NDP is no longer a working-class party and hasn’t been for some long while. In a global economy that has efficiently outsourced so much productive labour to the working masses of China, India and other less-developed countries, there’s not much of a base to be built in the proletariat that radical New Democrats once championed.

Substituting identity politics for class politics is sordid game that Liberals can play every bit as sharply as the NDP can. Perennial complaints about “false consciousness” notwithstanding, what little is left of Canada’s industrial working class is perfectly comfortable speaking the language of the Conservative party.

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If the NDP wants to persist in the mythology that it is Canada’s national “conscience,” it is going to have to figure out how our conscience should be nagging us about the legacy of a succession of Liberal and Conservative governments that has established Canada, according to the London-based Legatum Insititute’s most recent global rankings, as the freest and most tolerant country in the world. Canada is one of the best-governed and most prosperous countries on Earth, Legatum concludes, and one of the happiest places in the world for ethnic minorities, as well.