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The NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration (a future Quebec referendum that produces at least 50 per cent means a majority that’s clear enough for separation talks to begin) was a holdover from the past even when the resolution was adopted in 2005, and it’s going to sting, if Justin Trudeau has anything to do with it. Mulcair’s team is going to have to keep these ghosts of the NDP’s 1970s era locked in their crypts.

It’s plain luck that the NDP hasn’t been embarrassed by any major eruptions from the party’s “socialist caucus” lately.

In 2013, the caucus made a scene at the convention in Montreal, carrying banners protesting U.S. President Barack Obama’s drone wars in Pakistan, arguing against the inclusion of U.S. Democratic Party speakers on the conference agenda and protesting the amendment to the party constitution that removed any explicit reference to the NDP as a socialist party.

Unlike the United States, the left in Canada has not been quite so preoccupied with all the safe-space, trigger-warning, rape-culture, slut-shaming, micro-aggression, identity-politics and privilege-checking obsessions that have taken up all the space where a broadly based, “progressive” political activism might otherwise be. This is to the NDP’s organizational and electoral advantage, as long as campaigners keep all that at a low simmer and deny the Conservatives the opportunity to poke fun.

But it isn’t to the NDP’s advantage that the caucus is dominated by fresh-faced rubes. The more-seasoned Liberal MPs and even the Liberals’ novice candidates will want to toy with them when the real fighting starts.

It’s a long road to Oct. 19. Anything can happen.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.