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As premier, he succeeded by being a smart political leader and an astute economic manager. He also ensured that his government appealed to the widest number of Manitobans as possible. His budgets were always balanced and he made certain that the NDP’s reputation as a “tax-and-spend” party was not an issue in the life of his administrations. Doer understood the importance of promoting green environmental and energy polices, kept university fees frozen, reduced small business taxes and supported the building of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. True, as critics pointed out, Doer did not cure poverty or fix Winnipeg’s lousy roads. Yet he retired as one of the most popular politicians in the province’s history.

It is one thing to serve as the official opposition, quite another to be the government.

Above all, Doer grasped a tenet about Canadian politics that William Lyon Mackenzie King, the longest serving Canadian prime minister, mastered: Extreme and inflexible policies will never sustain long-term victory at the polls. “The extreme man,” King reasoned later in his career, “is always more or less dangerous, but nowhere more so than in politics. In a country like ours it is particularly true that the art of government is largely one of seeking to reconcile rather than to exaggerate differences — to come as near as may be possible to the happy mean.”

To judge by his recent campaign performance, Mulcair would seem to have embraced this philosophy as well and it may be the underlying factor that advances the NDP over the insurmountable hurdles it has faced in the past into office. Then again, Stephen Harper, who has pushed his party’s right wing social agenda into the background, seems to have figured out King’s secret to electoral success too. It may be that federal politics is about to emulate Manitoba’s experience with the Conservatives and NDP vying for the middle and the Liberals, the party that King represented, watching it unfold as the new perpetual third party.

National Post

Historian and writer Allan Levine’s most recent book is Toronto: Biography of a City.