Why the NDP was right to hand Tom Mulcair his walking papers

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They have come in for a kicking over the past couple of days, for the way they summarily dismissed the leader who led them to the second-best election showing in their history, even as their party risks splitting along ideological and geographic lines.

But as ugly as it may have been, and as messy a situation as it may leave them in, New Democrats made the right call when they handed Tom Mulcair his walking papers on Sunday.

There are times when sticking with the status quo for fear of the unknown is the responsible thing to do. This was not one of them – not given what that status quo is, and Mr. Mulcair's apparent preparedness to deal with it.

He was chosen as leader for a particular moment, when the NDP was unusually open to someone whose ties to their movement were tenuous. His professionalism, experience and pragmatism seemed to make him better-suited to building on the gains of the 2011 election than were the other available options. At the least he was perceived as the best bet to prevent things from falling apart after the death of Jack Layton, in particular by consolidating gains in Quebec, and cementing the NDP as the main alternative to Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

Now that moment has passed, in part because Mr. Mulcair failed to live up to it, proving unable even to capitalize upon the pre-election momentum suddenly bestowed upon him by the Alberta NDP's stunning victory last spring. Back in a distant third place, the NDP faces an altogether different challenge: carving out a relevant place for itself, and re-energizing activists and potential supporters, now that a Liberal prime minister has won office largely by eating its left-of-centre lunch.

Mr. Mulcair displayed little before last election to suggest he was the man for that task. His main acknowledged strength was holding the government to account in the House of Commons, which, while valuable to the country, will be fairly marginal to the NDP's rebuild. He deserved more credit than he got for imposing discipline upon a caucus made up largely of novices surprised to be there, but that required a somewhat authoritarian management style probably at odds with what party members will want now.

Nevertheless, there was initially a surprising degree of postelection openness among New Democrats to letting him stay on. Then as he limply made his case to do so, he confirmed two of their biggest concerns about him, and incentives for giving someone else a shot.

One was his limited interest in the organizational aspects of party building. A common pre-election complaint was that he spent too much time impressing Ottawa's press gallery, and not enough out on the road building grassroots support. That threatened to be even more problematic going forward, given how many people drifted away from the NDP this campaign, and the leadership review was his chance to prove he had learned his lesson.

Instead, Mr. Mulcair's aloofness proved as big a problem as ever. He was slow to reach out to disaffected members, and when he did was perceived as too defensive. His grasp on the party's dynamics was such that he seemed not to realize how much trouble he was in until too late. Even at the convention, in the final hours of a fight for his political life, he seems to have been minimally interested in pressing the flesh.

The other concern, more obvious from the outside, was his ability to present a new vision that would set the NDP apart from the Liberals, motivating its core while broadening its appeal. If auditioning fresh, Mr. Mulcair – previously a centre-right politician who approvingly quoted Margaret Thatcher – would be a deeply weird choice for that task. And as this weekend demonstrated, he didn't really wrap his head around it during his years on the job.

When he tried to appease the dogmatic downtown-Toronto crowd pushing the anti-oil Leap Manifesto, saying he would be open to keeping oil in the ground, he was blatantly pandering – and succeeded only in alienating Alberta New Democrats angrily opposed to it. Then, given one last chance to articulate an agenda that might bring those sides together, he regurgitated his stump speech from last year's campaign. The cumulative effect was that there was no positive reason to vote for him.

In its place, there was fear. With no obvious heir apparent, maybe the next leader would be worse. Maybe Quebec, key to the 2011 breakthrough, would slip further from the NDP's grasp. Maybe the factionalization would only get worse, and the professionalization that began under Mr. Layton would erode.

They're valid concerns. But few people participate in any party because they're afraid of what that party might otherwise become. Especially not the NDP, and especially not when it's hard to know what it even is right now.