When someone's as out to lunch as Notley on what the NDP is supposed to stand for, the national leader has to speak up, not suck up.

Jagmeet Singh is turning into the political cake that didn’t rise.

Normally a party gets a lift from a new leader; the NDP got the dead socialist bounce from Singh’s victory.

In the admittedly dicey metric of by-elections, the NDP has run like a three-legged horse with asthma. In the five byelections held since Singh’s first ballot win last October, there have been five straight drops in previous levels of support for the NDP. In Lac-Saint-Jean, where the party ran a close second in the 2015 general election, the Dippers plummeted to fourth place.

Singh claims he is playing the long game. It looks more like the death of a thousand cuts.

Making things worse, Premier Rachel Notley of Alberta, the Nurse Ratched of Canadian politics, is the one wielding the razor. A supposed political colleague, she couldn’t even be bothered to attend the first NDP national convention with Singh as leader.

Nor has it helped that she has publicly knifed him at every opportunity. When Singh justifiably criticized the Trudeau government for its breathlessly foolish offer of financial assistance to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (possibly out of the Canada Pension Fund no less), Notley pounced, declaring that she looked forward to the day when Singh would take a more “mature approach” to his leadership.

More mature, like banning a fellow province’s wine? Or cutting off its supply of oil? Or refusing to sign the statement at the most recent western premiers’ meeting?

And oh yes, like refusing to talk about pharmacare until she imposes her dubious fossil fetish on every other province with taxpayers’ money. Mature, like a dyed-in-the wool Harper Conservative.

If history is any guide in this matter, Notley will eventually take care of herself. It will not be Jason Kenney that necessarily brings her down. If anything, she has out-Kenneyed Kenney. It is her own provincial base that will be her undoing. NDP supporters are not kind to leaders who talk progressivism on the campaign trail and then become corporate cheerleaders in office.

When Darrell Dexter did that in Nova Scotia, his NDP provincial government was dumped like yesterday’s potato peelings – the first provincial government in 131 years in that province not to get a second term. In 2013, the NDP lost 24 seats, including the premier’s. Dexter is now a lobbyist at Global Public Affairs for the marijuana industry.

Dexter also did a disservice to the national party by governing like a Conservative in Nova Scotia. He hurt the NDP’s national brand. After his fiasco at the provincial level, the party lost three of its biggest federal stars in the 2015 election: Megan Leslie, Peter Stoffer and Robert Chisholm.

That fact is a cautionary tale. Singh has got to stop pandering to Notley, with encomiums so syrupy you would think he was applying for a verse-writing job at Hallmark Cards.

That doesn’t mean he has to respond to Notley’s childish jibes in kind. But it does mean standing up for the things he and the party represent.

National leadership is not about mollifying lapsed socialists. It is not about equivocating niceties which permit you to visit Alberta without having Ezra Levant greet you at the airport. It is about clear and consistent principles, stated firmly and plainly. The same message at every whistle-stop.

For example, Singh rightly chastises Trudeau for giving a blank cheque to a Texas oil company while dumping all the risks on Canadians.

But Earth to Jagmeet: Notley is saying much the same thing. So why does the national NDP leader continue to refer to her as a tremendous premier who is invaluable in the war on climate change? If anything, the opposite is true.

Singh may call his schmoozy accolades for Alberta’s premier political expedience, fluffing up a bird of the same political feather. Not it’s not. When someone is as far out to lunch as Notley is on what the NDP is supposed to stand for, the national leader has to speak up, not suck up.

If Singh wakes up, there is still time to take votes from Trudeau on climate change and the environment. The Liberals have broken faith with their base on these issues. The opening is there for another party, one with authentic bona fides on the climate file, to attract those disaffected Liberal supporters in 2019.

But with each day that Singh equivocates about Notley’s militant promotion of Big Oil against the principles of the NDP’s climate position, the political benefactor is more likely to be the Green Party than the NDP.

And then there is the question about Singh’s sense of fairness. Recent events suggest the NDP leader should revisit his handling of the whole Christine Moore case if he wants Canadians to endorse his sense of in-house justice.

Temporarily suspending the Quebec MP from caucus duties while an investigation takes place into allegations against her of an alleged improper relationship with a former Canadian soldier is one thing. But saying he is not interested in finding out who knew what and when inside the party about the whole affair won’t inspire much confidence in those who still think justice should be transparent.

The need for Singh to personally invest in getting to the bottom of this matter is more pressing than ever. Moore, herself now accused of improper behaviour, is the same complainant who got two Liberal MPs thrown out of the party, and helped trigger the ouster of fellow NDP MP Erin Weir from caucus.

Canadians need to know that all of these people were treated fairly.

Jagmeet Singh didn’t get a political honeymoon. If he doesn’t want an early divorce, he’s going to have to stand up to Nurse Ratched.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.