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Winter is coming, and it’s looking like a long, cold one for Jagmeet Singh.

Back in May 2017, I wrote in these pages that Singh’s impending candidacy for the NDP leadership was keeping a lot of partisan Liberals, like myself, awake at night.

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At the time, I felt that not only was he likely to win the leadership, but that he also represented “the only chance Canada’s social democratic movement [had] of taking power anytime in the next decade.”

Boy, was I ever wrong on the latter point.

Singh did indeed win the leadership race handily, but he should have spent the last year solidifying caucus support and rolling out policies aimed at wooing the blue-collar and middle-class Canadians that largely abandoned the NDP for the Trudeau Liberals in the 2015 election.

Instead, his first year at the helm of Canada’s social democrats has been marked by one misstep after another.

Within days of his victory, Singh made an appearance on CBC News Network that may have doomed his nascent leadership in its infancy.

Any communications advisor worth his or her salt would have advised him that the day’s host, veteran CBC journalist Terry Milewski, was likely to ask about his stance on militancy in India’s Punjab province given Milewski’s history of reporting on the issue and Singh’s own advocacy for greater human rights in the region.

Indeed, Milewski threw Singh a seemingly softball question, repeatedly asking him to condemn those who praise Talwinder Singh Parmar, considered by law enforcement officials to be the mastermind of the Air India bombing that killed 329 people, including 286 Canadians.