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Jeffrey Simpson: Ndp

50th Anniversary Dept: The NDP s great surge in the 2011 election put an end to those questions for now and shifted the focus to the enormous opportunities and risks that come with being the official opposition and holding 59 seats in Quebec, according to The Star. Given all this, you d expect that most of the NDP s core policies would appear hopelessly out of place in today s world. But a quick look at the sweep of current affairs, especially on a global scale, shows this is hardly the case and if the NDP had reached its 50th anniversary a few months ago, most of the columns to mark the occasion likely would have reopened the decades-long debate about how to renew the party, or whether it had any future at all. Still, the NDP s recent success has made another age-old debate more pressing than ever: whether the party should shift to the centre or hold to its traditional leftist principles. There is clearly strong support at the top of the party for moving to the mainstream. As the Star s Thomas Walkom noted recently , this is especially evident in the NDP s effort to keep the public from even seeing the party s constitution and main policy statements. In the media, any notion of the NDP adhering to its established views is often met with smug disdain. The Globe s Jeffrey Simpson, for instance, casts it simply as a question of whether the NDP is ready to grow up. As reported in the news.
@t official opposition, core policies