Well, that took long enough. The phoney war phase of the New Democratic Party leadership race has finally come to an end.

Peter Julian, the B.C. MP and former finance critic, announced this week he's looking to lead the party, and formally kicked off his bid for the leadership.  He's the first one to do it, and it's been a long time coming.

The NDP have been in a bizarre limbo for nearly a year.  It was last April when the party decided to show Tom Mulcair the door at a policy convention in Alberta.  Mulcair has been leading the party since, with no one formally declared to replace him.

Mulcair had gambled that his message of centrist stoicism, coupled with the occasional mention of Tommy Douglas, would be enough to vault the NDP into government.  Sadly for the NDP, a plodding campaign content to play the balanced-budgets game, while waiving dumb "STOP HARPER" stop signs, wasn't what Canadians were looking for.

Mulcair's failure opened the party's perpetual wound: How centrist is too centrist?  There are two typical paths imagined for the NDP: it moves to the centre to try winning government, or it swings to the left as the conscience of the Commons.

Mulcair's party was one driving to the centre of the spectrum.  The glimmer on the horizon of electoral victory made the party too cautious, too soft, too anxious to look competent.  They got beat, badly, when they were outflanked by younger, sunnier, more reckless politician in Justin Trudeau.

Canada had enough of being led by the serious man with the bad ties and opted for something fresh.

Trudeau's particular zing, that careless whiff of glamour, has the unfortunate side effect of letting the NDP pass on confronting the peril they're in.  While the party was able to make clear it didn't want Mulcair, it didn't have to decide whether it wanted his centrist strategy.
The party has demurred from accepting there's something so existential at stake.  Julian's half-hour speech made no mention of the crisis that's facing the NDP.  He laid out proposals for free tuition, better housing, an end to pipelines, and true reconciliation with Canada's indigenous population.  He received the loudest cheers when he talked about Canada's need to speak out against politicians like Donald Trump.

But the broader vision of what the future of the NDP is, of where Julian will cast their lot, was absent.  In setting the tone for his campaign, the candidate put forward some specific policies, but no grand tableau.

This attitude could explain why it's taken so long for someone to pay their $30,000, submit the required signatures, and jump in the race.  The NDP split itself down the middle when it cast aside Mulcair, but offered no replacement when it did.  The party has continually lagged behind the Conservatives and the Liberals in quarterly fundraising figures, and will be led by its zombie leader for another seven months.

Add to that, the one place the party did win provincially is the one place it could never count on federally.  Rachel Notley may have won the premiership in Alberta, but the federal NDP is so anti-energy it would never gain traction in the province.  Speaking at the same convention as Mulcair was ousted, Notley practically begged the party to change its mind and embrace the workers of the oilsands.

What should have been a celebration of Notley's triumph in a deeply conservative province, was yet another awkward tiptoe around a cataclysmic division within the party.

It's a party willing to embrace the cause of manufacturing jobs, but quick to abandon the men and women extracting the natural resources.  The auto worker needs to be championed, but the oilsands miner should be shunned.  That one could not exist without the other is never mentioned.

These paradoxes need to be reconciled eventually.  The NDP cannot be the party of the left, while also trying for the responsible centre forever.  It can't settle its divisions with big orange hugs.

There's a chance this might doom the party to a return to perpetual third-party status.  Maybe the NDP is fated to be the conscience of Parliament once more.  But if they don't bother standing for something, what's the point of existing at all?

The leadership race needs to reckon with what the NDP is.  If they choose to ignore their plight, the choice they'll make is to be irrelevant.