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Back in the mists of before the before, when Tom Mulcair was driving hard to become leader of the New Democrats, he took polite but pointed issue with his party’s historically reflexive opposition to resource development. No longer, he declared, could the NDP afford to accept its having just three seats west of Ontario and east of British Columbia.

All of which leaves us scratching our heads, now, at Mulcair’s headlong rush into open warfare with the western premiers, or indeed anyone whose livelihoods depend on the oilsands, with his talk of “Dutch disease” — this being the notion that the loonie has become “artificially” inflated by burgeoning demand for energy, and that our manufacturing base is getting hammered as a result.

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Projected seat count in Alberta in Election 2015? Zero. Saskatchewan? Zero. What can Mulcair be thinking? The answer actually has little to do with Alberta or indeed with the price of oil. It has everything to do with the seat count in the House of Commons. Very simply, and oddly, given the supposed declining influence of Canada’s largest province within Confederation, it’s all about Ontario.