AS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS GOT down to work in 2016, the New Democratic Party (NDP) invited the party faithful to participate in a couple of telephone town-hall meetings about the party’s dismal federal election results. Not surprisingly, party executives got an earful from campaign workers, donors and aging baby boomers.

I listened in on the Eastern Canada call. The callers were very predictable in their denunciation of national campaign staff, their leader’s lack of passion, movement away from hardline socialism, neglect of the grassroots and so on.

What wasn’t discussed was far more telling about the party’s future. The NDP will need to ask itself some hard questions about its viability and about its future when its members meet in Edmonton in April.

While there were a few references in the conference call to getting the party back to its labour and working class roots, there was no discussion of whether labour actually supports the NDP anymore. This is surprising because the largest union in the country, Unifor, publicly urged its members to vote strategically (read: Liberal) in order to get Stephen Harper out of office.

Unifor probably wasn’t the only union to ask its members to vote this way. Although the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) didn’t recommend strategic voting, the CLC didn’t endorse the NDP, either.

One union got caught illegally funnelling donations to the Liberals.

Considering the financial reliance the NDP has had on unions and unions’ rank-and-file members, you would think future support of the labour movement – and its money – would be a topic of discussion.

One party that has noticed the inroads the Liberals are making into the labour movement is the Conservatives. Why hasn’t the NDP?

When Harper banned political donations from corporations and unions in 2006, his party already had converted its fundraising to small, grassroots contributions. Harper would later cancel most, but not all party subsidies, putting his rivals in a tough position.

The Liberals finally caught up with the Conservatives financially in 2015, which leaves the NDP with considerable catching up to do in funding.

Another question missing in the NDP’s conference call was: “Where were the kids?” A viable political party has to have youths to pose for the cameras, schlep leaflets and staff campaign headquarters. This topic didn’t come up until late in the conference call, when two members of the youth wing called in and blasted the party for ignoring them. Frankly, most of the callers sounded like aging white people.

The two youths complained that the national office ignored them and didn’t support the campus youth clubs, while the Liberals and Conservatives made good use of their kid brigades. NDP party president Rebecca Blaikie, who chaired the call, validated these complaints by saying: “[The Liberals and Conservatives] definitely ate our lunch on campuses across the country.”

NDP party leader Tom Mulcair may have the looks and demeanour of a suave 19th- century banker, but demographics may be the NDP’s major problem. The Liberals gained three million votes from the millennials this time around.

The NDP also should be looking at historical voting patterns beyond the fact that Canadians haven’t elected a prime minister with facial hair since Sir Charles Tupper. When the Liberals are on their way out, the NDP becomes a parking lot for disgruntled left-of-centre voters. Always.

The Conservatives need this to happen – to split the Liberal vote enough to win. Likewise, the Liberals know that when the Conservatives start slipping, the Liberal Party can call these votes home.

This is why the NDP went from having its largest caucus ever, at 43 MPs, to just seven seats and losing its party status in 1993. And why the NDP plunged to third party status in 2015.

Both the Liberals and the Conservatives would have to rewrite their playbooks if the NDP failed. Jack Layton persuaded the NDP at its policy convention in Quebec City in 2006 to move to just left of centre to attract more middle-class voters. That strategy might have worked this time, had Mulcair not decided to offer voters Stephen Harper Lite as a campaign platform.

Layton’s strategy deserves another shot. But the NDP needs to take an honest look at what it has become and where it wants to go – for its own sake.

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