Photograph by: Bryanna Bradley, Montreal Gazette

The federal NDP are backtracking on some environmental promises they made in their own economic platform for the first year if they were to form the next government. The party has since explained that the $3.6 billion in green spending would have to be delayed to coincide with revenue from a cap and trade carbon system that has yet to be implemented.

“We do indeed propose that revenues from pricing carbon (dioxide emissions) be put back into improving the environment — that’s how carbon use will be reduced,” the NDP stated in a press release. “If revenues from pricing carbon are delayed or are lower than planned, then the investments will also be delayed or will be phased in more slowly than planned.”

It should be noted that the NDP have criticized other political parties, but in particular the Conservatives, for not being able to provide concrete plans and numbers to price carbon or develop a sound environmental plan. Now it looks like the NDP are guilty of the same kind of flimflammery.

That isn’t surprising. No political party in its right mind would want to scare away voters by committing to solid industry-killing environmental plans other than the Green Party, who rightfully is poised to win zero seats on May 2. If the Conservatives have been evasive about an environmental plan, it’s because nobody can square the circle that is slamming the same corporate industry that provides the jobs each party leader is promising they can deliver.

But beyond that, the NDP know they don’t have to actually create realistic deliverables, which is why most of the time they serve as a good opposition party to whichever government is in power. They can advocate for any unrealistic spending program and policy because at the end of the day they don’t have to answer for it.

This is not unlike the manner in which the unions that support the NDP operate with the workers they represent. The unions aren’t responsible for the fiscal solvency of a corporation, so they’ll ask for whatever they believe they can get and not worry about how it affects the company. That’s part of the reason for the automotive industry collapse — though certainly not the whole reason — the unions thought that good times would always exist, or more probably they didn’t care.

An NDP party isn’t really advocating for government policy that is necessarily realistic, so much as it is presenting the kind of policies that will serve as opposition advocacy to the ruling party. It’s not possible to fulfil the kind of promises they make, and any rudimentary examination of their platform confirms this.

Having said that, occasionally the world goes crazy and the unlikeliest candidate with the most unrealistic promises wins. No, I’m not referring to Barack Obama, though that is a good example. I’m talking about the Ontario NDP under the Bob Rae government.

By the time Rae got into power he had made so many promises to workers and unions that the NDP had no choice but to make good on many of its fiscally incompetent policies, including social spending, social housing and tax increases. When the deficit soared to $9 billion, Rae tried to make pragmatic cuts to the public sector, ultimately alienating his own base.

The problem is the NDP are caught between two worlds and there’s little way to bridge them. On the one hand they want to make the kind of promises and offer the alternatives that is quite blatantly sapping soft Liberal support away in the polls. But on the other hand they must be cognizant that the more viable an alternative the party becomes, the more closely scrutinized and debunked their economic platform will be.

An NDP in the OLO, however, can be just as dangerous as one in power. If election day puts Jack Layton in Stornoway — the ultimate humiliation for Ignatieff by the way — then the party would be more than just a power broker in a minority government. It would be able to foist each of its infeasible policies on the Conservatives and use the Bloc Quebecois as further leverage. It would even put Layton in a strong bargaining position for a coalition agreement.

Only a Conservative majority will really render the NDP surge irrelevant. That, or election day restores the NDP to their former obscurity as panic sets in and the tide moves back to the red.