Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair campaign together in Montreal in 2011. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot

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It must be unutterably frustrating to be a federal NDP organizer right now.

For a decade, the party has gotten many of the big strategic things right. Meanwhile, the fecklessness of the Liberals often seemed to mock the NDP’s efforts.

Today, after their own decade of confusion and internal conflict, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau seem to levitate like Doug Henning, while the NDP maintains an precarious grip on its status as the natural alternative to the ruling Conservatives.

This summer, the NDP carefully raised the profile of its platform for the abolition of the Senate. But that is no guarantee that the Liberals won’t swoop in and grab the headlines now that Mike Duffy has opened yet another chapter in the Senate epic.

Brad Lavigne, who was part of Jack Layton’s inner circle and his campaign manager in the the 2011 breakthrough campaign, has written a book, Building the Orange Wave, which provides a brisk narrative of Layton’s eight years and four elections as party leader and tells us a lot about the modern NDP.

What’s amazing is how persistent and disciplined Layton was in pursuing a strategy to make the party a contender for power — when, in truth, there was very little prospect of even the half-success he finally achieved in 2011. You keep asking yourself: What made him go on?

From the start, Layton was determined to cultivate Quebec — spending money, recruiting candidates and engineering delicate but important policy changes, notably the Sherbrooke Declaration. Many of those around Layton argued quite sensibly that this was a waste, given the party’s doleful history in the province.

Layton reformed the party’s dysfunctionally decentralized organization and improved its grassroots fundraising. He cleverly reacted to an impending ban on union funding of political parties by getting the unions to “bundle” what would have been their future contributions. That allowed the party to buy a headquarters building in Ottawa that could be used for collateral in future election campaigns.

As Justin Trudeau is proving, the Liberals have considerable resources. Their party retains a reputation for moderate, middle-of-the-road governance. NDPers can decry this as lack of principle — but in a democracy, reading the wind is a skill too.

Although the NDP achieved modest gains in each of Layton’s first three elections, the party always seemed to fall just short of what it needed to play a decisive role in the minority parliaments of those years. Nonetheless, Layton skillfully used what leverage he had — cooperating when he saw an opportunity with the Liberals and, at one stage, even with the Conservatives. He was the driving force behind the 2008 attempt to create a Liberal-NDP coalition government. When the attempt failed, however, he was ready to compete as fiercely against the Liberals as against the Bloc and the Conservatives.

There is surprisingly little in Lavigne’s book about policy, even though this was one of Layton’s most delicate threads. This may reflect Lavigne’s narrow perspective as an organizer and communicator — or it might have something to do with Layton’s tactical approach to policy.

Where he had an opening to wedge along a progressive plank, such as opposition to the Afghanistan war and support for same-sex marriage, Layton did so lustily. But he also hedged on fiscal issues, embracing the Conservatives’ budgetary framework for deficit reduction, if not their tax policies. And he fudged when he had to — on gun control, for example, which deeply divided his caucus.

In a remarkable passage, Lavigne recounts an exchange he had with the party’s policy team for the 2011 election, meant to highlight the NDP’s transition from a party of opposition to one of power.

“What’s our response to a Conservative corporate tax cut?” Lavigne asked. When someone suggested a corporate tax increase, Lavigne said, “No … a small business tax cut.”

Similarly, the party’s response to the government’s F-35 fighter jet contract would not be simply to cancel it, but to invest in the navy.

“Their military priority is planes,” Lavigne remembers saying. “Our is ships.”

Two weeks into the 2011 election campaign it was far from apparent that any of this would make a difference. A clearly unhealthy Jack Layton (and we may never know how ill he knew himself to be at the time) laboured through the start of the campaign before he finally ‘clicked’ and all those years of effort paid off.

The contrast between Layton’s steady leadership and the Liberals’ inconstancy is stunning. Layton faced four Liberal leaders in his time: Jean Chrétien, the cautious incrementalist; Paul Martin, the manic structural reformer; Stéphane Dion, the one-issue candidate who could not pivot from the environment to the economy even in the middle of a worldwide financial meltdown; and Michael Ignatieff, the man who returned to Canada to become prime minister and to find himself — but (to his regret, apparently) only found us.

Through these years, the Liberals’ neglect of their organization and fundraising machinery veered close to political malpractice. Liberal policy was as unpredictable as the party’s succession of leaders — no, more so.

Yet for all that, as Justin Trudeau is proving, the Liberals have considerable resources. Their party retains a reputation for moderate, middle-of-the-road governance. NDPers can decry this as lack of principle — but in a democracy, reading the wind is a skill too.

As a self-styled champion of the pressured middle class, Trudeau has carved out a theme that cuts with erstwhile supporters of both the Conservatives and New Democrats. We shall see whether the Liberals can sustain this success once they begin to clothe this theme in policy — or whether they will even feel the need to try.

It is insanely unfair from an NDP perspective that so many Canadians seem ready to embrace the wastrel Liberals as a Prodigal Son. But politics, like life, isn’t always fair.

What the NDP needs to do now is stick doggedly with its strategic plan. Trudeau’s moment may pass — and theirs might just come again.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

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