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Canada’s Museum of History might want to consider putting up a new exhibit in the wake of the last election — one devoted to all those predictions that the Liberals and New Democrats would someday be forced to merge into one party.

Remember those? Many serious people argued that as long as the parties on the left remained two separate entities, Conservatives would become Canada’s natural governing party for the 21st century.

The predictions didn’t just come from Conservatives, or the pundit class. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien mused repeatedly about the prospect.

You’ll note that we aren’t hearing those predictions today, with Parliament firmly in the hands of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his 184-seat majority. What’s more, no one seems to be suggesting that the NDP — reduced to 44 seats — should now pack it in and join forces with the dominant Liberals.

One possible reason for the silence: You could argue that the merger has happened already … unofficially. It didn’t take place from the top down, but upward, from the level of ordinary voters. Throughout the election, the polls kept telling us that Canadian progressives would be happy with a united left. So the voters created one — under Liberal management, and without NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair and much of the old NDP caucus.

In the days immediately following the election, the Leger polling firm set out to measure people’s feelings about the Liberal majority.

Leger found high levels of satisfaction with the result — especially among NDP voters. At a presentation in Ottawa last week, Leger pollster Sébastien Dallaire threw the numbers up on the big screen.

Predictably, 93 per cent of Liberal voters said they were pleased with the victory. (One does wonder about the other 7 per cent. Perhaps it’s true that Liberal party will always have a perpetually-disgruntled faction.) A full 60 per cent of NDP supporters also pronounced themselves satisfied with Trudeau’s victory, as did 45 per cent of Greens.

In the long term, New Democrats will have to ask themselves the same hard question Liberals faced in the wake of their 2011 election disaster. Paraphrased, it comes down to this: What’s the point of the party anyway? In the long term, New Democrats will have to ask themselves the same hard question Liberals faced in the wake of their 2011 election disaster. Paraphrased, it comes down to this: What’s the point of the party anyway?

Even 12 per cent of Conservatives said they were satisfied with how things turned out on Oct. 19. (No word on whether this includes some members of the current Conservative caucus, newly unshackled from Stephen Harper’s PMO.)

Other pollsters at last week’s post-election analysis in Ottawa found the progressive left in similarly buoyant spirits. EKOS pollster Frank Graves noted that an election that was expected to focus on the economy (which would have suited the Conservatives) instead ended up as a debate about values — and mostly about the kind of values that unite New Democrats and Liberals.

When, for instance, EKOS asked people about their vision for Canada in the context of the election, nearly two-thirds supported an “active federal government” and about the same number chose humanitarian aid and development over defence as the primary goal of foreign policy.

After watching all the presentations, Forum pollster Lorne Bozinoff said the collective picture painted was one of a “centre-left country.”

All of which confronts the New Democrats with some existential questions they’ll have to answer in both the long term and the short.

In the long term, they’ll have to ask themselves the same hard question Liberals faced in the wake of their 2011 election disaster. Paraphrased, it comes down to this: What’s the point of the party anyway?

Back then, I wrote a piece that posed this question slightly differently: If the Liberal party didn’t exist today, would we have to invent it?

Now it’s the NDP’s turn to ask itself that question — even if we aren’t hearing anyone saying that Mulcair should just fold his party under the Liberals’ big red tent.

At least one brave New Democrat, Ontario MPP Cheri DiNovo, touched on that issue this week when she spoke to Toronto Star columnist Desmond Cole. DiNovo lamented the federal New Democrats’ retreat from socialism and its efforts to cosy up to the right on austerity measures. “We have to remember who the hell we are,” DiNovo said, in an echo of the Liberals’ internal dialogue after 2011.

The NDP rebuilding efforts, we can presume, will tackle these issues in the months and years ahead.

They face a more pressing question, however, as Parliament resumes in the short term: What is the point of the NDP in the Commons?

Reportedly, the NDP took some heat from its own supporters during the campaign when it attacked Trudeau. Progressives didn’t like the divisions on the left. And as the Leger poll indicates, NDP supporters are not all that unhappy with how things turned out.

For an opposition party looking to claim a space on the left, this could make things a bit awkward in question period. Can Mulcair still argue, as he did during the election, against running up a deficit? In that case, the NDP would have more in common with their fellow opposition members on the Conservative benches.

Don’t worry, though. No one is talking about an NDP-Conservative merger these days either. Merger speculation is so 41st Parliament.

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada’s best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.

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