No matter what the NDP does, it's NEVER going to be able to "out square" the Tories and the Liberals.  And as New Labour shows, once you've made an obsessive effort to be as uptight as the right, you're not going to be able to do anything in power that's worth doing.  New Labour did a few tiny increments on education and social welfare, but they were trivial compared to the war Tony got them into just to prove that, in the words of the Billy Bragg song "we don't like peace campaigners 'round here".  The law and order vote will always be anti-NDP and there's no good reason to even TRY to get it.

The only way to deal with attacks on your supporters for being too activist, too idealist, too "pie in the sky", is to actually DEFEND activists and idealists and to defend the idea that people like that are as valid and as important in politics as any Liberal fundraiser or Tory investment banker.  If you DEFEND your base, you can win.

I"m sure even you, Stock, would agree that it could never be worth having a federal NDP government if the party had to go Blairite to get it, and that it would automatically morally disqualify an NDP government from calling itself an NDP government if it ever involved itself in anything remotely like the Iraq War or sending people to Gitmo.