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Where, oh where, has the NDP gone? Not so long ago, they were the official Opposition. And in the run-up to the last election, they appeared for a moment to have a real chance of unseating Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and forming the next government.

Alas, for the NDP, that was but a glimmer of hope, as Canadians soon awoke to the glories and glamour of Justin Trudeau. He and his Liberals roared to power with 39 per cent of the popular vote after the election, the NDP dropped back to its historic position as Canada’s third-place party, a mere footnote in the history books of most federal elections, and party members fell into a funk.

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Then the Dippers held a convention in Edmonton and adopted the Leap Manifesto — a document with the rigour of early Nostradamus and the appeal of a mass root canal — the brainchild of socialist nomad Avi Lewis and his equally itinerant spouse, Naomi Klein. At the same gathering of political pall bearers, the party delivered to its leader, Thomas Mulcair, the thorny bouquet of a lacklustre leadership review, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t so much a rebuke, as a public grinding of the axe before calling poor Mulcair to the executioner’s block.