It wasn’t that long ago that the federal NDP held the balance of political power in Canada. Now, it looks like it will be lucky to hold onto any political power at all. The defection by Nunavut MP Lori Idlout leaves them with just six federal MPs, and that’s without accounting for Alexandre Boulerice’s widely rumoured move to provincial politics in Quebec. If he also leaves caucus, the once-mighty party of Jack Layton will be left with an actual handful of seats, none of which are east of the Manitoba-Ontario border. 

Boulerice, by the way, would be jumping to run for Quebec Solidaire, a party that’s polling a distant fifth in the province ahead of October’s provincial election. But maybe his odds there look better than they do for the federal NDP, which attracted less than five per cent of the vote in Quebec in the last election and seems poised to elect a new leader who barely speaks French. As former NDP national director (and Quebec leadership debate moderator) Karl Bélanger told the CBC last fall, “if you're not able to speak French, to debate in French, you're not gonna break through [in Quebec]. Simple as that.”

At this point, though, they’d take a breakthrough anywhere. After polling consistently in the high teens and low twenties for most of Justin Trudeau’s time in office, the NDP has been consistently stuck under 10 per cent with Mark Carney in charge. The rightward drift of the........

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