The New Democratic Party of Canada is holding their biennial convention here in Quebec City this weekend. In the last election, the NDP made some impressive strides in its quest to gain credibility in economic matters, so I’ve decided to attend as an observer in order to see if they stay on track.

My first impression is that the NDP leadership have some ways to go in persuading ordinary party members of the wisdom of using reality-based economics to formulate policy. The list of resolutions (there must be at least 500 of them) includes quite a few weird and wacky proposals, such as:

Resolution 5-A9: BE IT RESOLVED that Jack Layton and the Federal Caucus vigorously promote the NDP plan to use the Bank of Canada to carry some of the public sector debt and pay the interest to ourselves instead of borrowing entirely from the private sector. (Kingston and the Islands NDP).

Many other proposals are quite sensible and worthy of discussion. Of course, as an Observer, I won’t be able to actually offer an opinion. But I will be interested to see if the general membership endorses the direction taken in the last election platform.