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The most attractive aspect of the New Democratic Party is its idealism. Every party attracts supporters, activists and candidates who are there to promote a particular interest — whether it is farmers, commuters, businesspeople, or union members.

But the NDP includes an unusual number of people who are drawn to politics by their desire to help others — in particular those who are weak, poor, vulnerable or marginalized. People who don’t always have the resources to fight effectively for themselves.

That doesn’t mean NDP proposals are always sound. It does mean they often embody a moral force that is absent when, say, a business owner argues for lower taxes.

It’s no coincidence that Tommy Douglas, who was CCF premier of Saskatchewan before becoming the NDP’s first federal leader, was also a Baptist minister. Many of the movement’s leaders came from the ‘social gospel’ movement. From its inception the party was as much a moral project as an ideological one.

And this lies behind the visceral hostility many New Democrats feel towards the Liberal party.

New Democrats feel best about themselves when they are doing what they believe to be right. Liberals make a virtue of compromise. While New Democrats feel vaguely uneasy about ‘doing what you have to do to win’, Liberals are more likely to think that unless you win, you can’t do anything at all.

New Democrats may be close to the Liberals ideologically, but in many ways they are psychologically closer to Conservatives — who also must wrestle with when, whether and to what it extent it’s appropriate to compromise cherished beliefs.

As its last act before being forced to an election by the NDP, the Liberal government of Ontario brought down a budget which, among other things, proposed a new Ontario pension plan, a significant boost in the child benefit for low-income families, and money for hospitals and schools.

It was, by all accounts, the most NDP-friendly budget since the NDP was itself in power in the 1990s. You’d have to be nuts to think the Liberals did it out of purity of heart. They did it to win NDP support in the provincial parliament — or, failing that, to win over NDP supporters on the hustings.

But in deciding to vote down the budget and trigger an election, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath courts the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that Ontario soon will have a Progressive Conservative government that will do none of those good things, or a new Liberal government less inclined to trim its sails to suit the NDP.

There may be heavy consequences to the choices the NDP makes and it shouldn’t resort to smooth-sounding phrases that evade the nature of its dilemma.

In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that the people the NDP traditionally has stood to defend will lose out.

Horwath explained her decision, rather robotically, with two carefully crafted lines. The first was that while the promises might sound good, you couldn’t trust the Liberals to keep them. The second was that Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne only made those promises in a “mad dash to avoid scandal”.

It couldn’t be plainer. It isn’t the content of the Liberal government’s proposals that’s at issue. It’s that the Liberal party itself is morally fraught.

Of course, as a matter of practical politics, Horwath and the NDP could have supported the budget, kept the pressure on to implement it, and then gone to the polls to denounce the government if it failed to deliver.

There are echoes here of a far more consequential decision by Jack Layton’s NDP in 2005 to bring down the Liberal government of Paul Martin, just days after he concluded the Kelowna Accord. The accord would have poured billions of dollars into education, health and housing for aboriginal people. Although more specific in its target population, it arguably would have stood alongside medicare, the Canada Pension Plan and unemployment insurance as one of the most transformational social policies in Canadian history.

Like Horwath more recently, Layton argued that the Liberals had lost the moral standing to govern, not least because of the sponsorship scandal which had played out so spectacularly at the Gomery inquiry.

The result of the election that followed, of course, was Stephen Harper’s Conservative government — which quickly reneged on the Kelowna Accord, with enormous and tragic consequences for a generation of young aboriginal people.

(A footnote: Although it has played no more than a minor role in its demise, the NDP recently opposed the Harper government’s First Nations education bill that would have poured nearly two billion dollars into schools — the first serious redress of the Kelowna Accord’s cancellation. The arguments against the bill have been all about the consultation process and are disturbingly free of debate about the well-being of children.)

None of this is to deny that there was significant corruption in the Liberal government Layton opposed, and the same appears to be true of the provincial government Andrea Horwath just brought down.

In the end, citizens have no way of holding governments to account for corruption except by voting them out. Sometimes that means good policies have to die. But the NDP should be clear-eyed about this: There may be heavy consequences to the choices it makes and it shouldn’t resort to smooth-sounding phrases that evade the nature of its dilemma.

The NDP too must be held morally accountable for its decisions and what they mean for the people they say they wish to defend. Sometimes compromise is a virtue.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

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.