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   National Post /Michael Den Tandt  - April 26, 2015   
      
      
   If you think Tom Mulcair is down for the count, you’re wrong   
      
      
   Is Thomas Mulcair down for the count?   Judging from every recent poll you   
   might imagine so.   But you’d be wrong.   
      
   Six months ahead of the scheduled October vote, the NDP leader’s advisors are   
   feeling good about his positioning and prospects.  They have reason to feel   
   that way.   
      
   It’s easy to make too much of the handful of recent surveys showing a slight   
   uptick in NDP support, to 23 per cent or so, as measured by aggregator   
   threehundredeight.com.   Some have drawn a connection to the opposition   
   leader’s relentlessly sunny disposition in recent appearances.   His   
   high-voltage grin blazes out from every campaign image.   Others point to his   
   Main-Street-friendly overtures to voters in the Greater Toronto Area, which   
   began in earnest in mid-March.   
      
   I suspect there’s something deeper at work, which is simply this:   
   Consistency.   
      
   For more than a year, Mulcair has been consistent in the positions he’s   
   taken,   
   with no equivocation.  And the two policy areas in which such firmness might   
   have done him major harm have effectively been taken off the table.   
      
   Heard anyone on the federal scene talking much about the Keystone XL pipeline   
   recently? Dutch Disease? No?   Reason: The locus of debate has moved past   
   whether this or that pipeline plan is preferable, to whether any can fly   
   politically in the current climate.  And the price of oil has collapsed.   As a   
   result, both Liberals and Conservatives have lost a powerful cudgel with which   
   they might previously have beaten Mulcair about the head and neck.   
      
   His second Achilles’ heel, outside Quebec, has been his party’s Sherbrooke   
   Declaration, which asserts 50 per cent-plus-one in a referendum would   
   constitute a sufficient threshold for the Quebec separation.  The Supreme   
   Court’s decision in 1998, requiring a clear majority on a clear question   
   before   
   negotiations on separation can begin (with the clarity of the question to be   
   judged by Parliament), obviously indicates a threshold above 50-plus-one, by   
   using the adjective “clear.â€�   This defines a “majorityâ€� as something   
   beyond   
   the simple; ergo, 50-plus-one is not enough.   
      
   But again, except in the fevered imaginations of those given to constitutional   
   chatter, this is not a flashpoint now, because Quebec Premier Philippe   
   Couillard was kind enough to send the Parti Quebecois packing in last   
   spring’s   
   election.   
      
      
   On the plus side of policy debate, meantime, the NDP leader has his opposition   
   to Bill C-51, the federal anti-terror bill, which is riddled with problems the   
   Conservatives have refused to address (and has caused a big headache for the   
   Liberals, who’ve pledged to vote for it, holding their noses). . .  his   
   opposition to the bombing campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the   
   Levant which, agree or disagree on principle, few could fail to understand . .   
   . and his deliberate hewing to middle-class values in pitching his economic   
   policies, with the refrain that a Mulcair-led government would neither raise   
   personal income taxes nor run deficits.   
      
   The NDP’s plan to abolish the Senate is almost certainly impossible given the   
   constitutional constraints, again imposed by the Supreme Court of Canada.   But   
   this does not much lessen its rhetorical appeal in the Summer of Duff, with Red   
   Chamber excesses on unlovely display and a probe of Senate spending by   
   Auditor-General Michael Ferguson still to land.   
      
   Lost in all the coalition talk, as polls show either the Conservatives or   
   Liberals are within reach of forming a minority, is that in either case Mulcair   
   stands to hold the balance of power.   It isn’t inconceivable he could   
   leverage   
   major social-democratic concessions (proportional representation, anyone?) out   
   of a Harper minority government, in exchange for his temporary backing.   
   Because only Nixon could go to China, the Dippers might actually be in a better   
   political position to shore up a   
   Tory minority than would be the Trudeau Liberals.   
      
   Last, there’s the wild card of televised debate.  The NDP leader’s   
   gravitas as   
   a speaker is recognized in Ottawa, less so beyond it. In televised combat such   
   recognition can come in the space of a few minutes, as Alberta NDP leader   
   Rachel Notley showed Friday in handing a shell-shocked Premier Jim Prentice his   
   hat and raincoat, too.   Consistent policy positioning and some luck have   
   bought Mulcair his ante; a debate sweep by him, or a serious flub by Trudeau or   
   Harper, could change the game.   
      
   The greatest risk the NDP leader faces now, oddly for someone running in   
   distant third, is over-confidence and the perception of arrogance.   And this   
   is why, between now and October, we can expect to see a lot more images of him   
   hobnobbing at sporting events, such as last Wednesday’s Sens-Habs match-up,   
   and   
   sipping beer in pubs.   Intellectual Tom is to become Everyman Tom; and the   
   race becomes one of three, not two.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)