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One of the conclusions of Kenneth Arrow, who won the 1972 Nobel Prize in economics for his research on voting systems, was that healthy democracies should produce electoral outcomes uncorrupted by "irrelevant variables."  In other words, an obviously pointless act should not exert undue influence over who winds up winning.

In Canada, voting NDP has been a pointless act since the party's inception.  The New Democrats have never come remotely close to winning a federal election, and in our majority-rules parliamentary regime, they've impacted virtually no decision of consequence over the last five decades.  Yet due to quirks in our electoral system, the NDP nevertheless remains the most powerful "irrelevant variable" of Canadian politics.  Their success or failure in wasting votes on the margin exerts enormous consequence in deciding who runs the country.

When the NDP does unusually well, in elections such as 2011, 2006, 1988, and 1984, Conservatives tend to win.  When the NDP does unusually bad, as in 2000 or 1993, the result is a Liberal landslide.  In many ways, the outcome of the 2015 election was determined far more by the failures of the Thomas Mulcair campaign than anything Stephen Harper or Justin Trudeau did.

Though popular legend holds that the Conservatives lost because they "alienated" too many immigrant-heavy ridings with racism or whatever, a look at the data indicates the Tories only won such ridings in 2011 thanks to a divided left.  The Conservative share of the popular vote in these places didn't really decline much between 2011 and 2015 — the NDP vote, however, collapsed amid a Liberal surge.

Jack Layton was a vastly more compelling leader than the woman who came before him and the man who came after.  Though he never did much for the 70%-plus of the country who consistently voted against him, his personality struck some as compelling and his passion as genuine — particularly in contrast to the terrible trio of Liberal leaders he overlapped with.  A substantial slice of anti-Conservative voters struggled with who to support: their hearts said NDP, but their brains said Liberal.  Conservative prospered from this indecision and won three terms in office.

If we accept the premise that Justin Trudeau's electoral coalition contains a lot of former Layton voters (a justified conclusion, given Trudeau's caucus features many MPs from ridings that went NDP in 2011), then any Conservative path back to power will require the emergence of a Layton-esque leader to again temp progressive voters and divide their loyalties.

I nominate Jagmeet Singh for the role.  He's the 37-year-old bearded, turban-clad deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, representing the greater Toronto riding of Bramalea-Gore-Malton in the provincial legislature.

Singh's leftist bona fides are strong.  His Castro eulogy was even more glowing than the prime minister's, and as I write this, the featured video on his website is one offering support for the anti-Israel BDS movement (or at least one opposing opposition to it).

But more than that, as Canada's first nonwhite, non-Christian prime ministerial candidate, he would be brimming with the most potent weapon of progressive division at the moment — identity politics.

A large number of left-wing voters, especially young ones in urban centres, have come to view casting a ballot as an exercise in demonstrating their own virtues, rather than an objective analysis of who can most competently run the country.  In the eyes of such types, Singh's presence in the race for PM will instantly transform the next federal election into a referendum on whether Canada is "ready" to be led by an Indo-Canadian, or whether we live in an irredeemably racist hellhole.  Affecting exaggerated, Obama-style veneration for Singh could offer an unprecedented opportunity for racially anxious leftists to preen their progressiveness.

It would be a direct challenge to Prime Minister Trudeau's standing as the wokest, privilege-checkingest social justice warrior in the room.  Liberal partisans would suddenly find themselves having to make (horrors!) the pragmatic argument for why an incumbent white prime minister was better equipped to address social inequality than some brown back bencher from Queen's Park — a track New Democrats would invariably describe as condescending, if not colonialist, if not outright white supremacy with hints of fascism.

Such internecine squabbling over allyship and intersectionality is not the sort of thing most Canadians care about.  But in a country whose political future rests heavily on irrelevant variables, it could prove a tremendous asset to the right.

Photo Credit: Global News

Written by J.J. McCullough

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