On Saturday, the NDP faithful were presented with two very different politicians who articulated two very different paths out of the political wilderness in which the party now finds itself.

Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta, used her early afternoon speech at the federal party’s convention to excoriate conservative ideology, offering the hope of success to a party disheartened by loss. Then she asked her fellow delegates to be more charitable toward the hundreds of thousands of workers who make a living in the resource sector, and to consider that with the responsibilities of government comes the ability to implement real, practical policy — on climate change, for example — while protecting the social safety net that social democrats hold paramount.

Later that night, former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis offered a very different kind of barn burner. Lewis excoriated the governing Liberals in brutal, frank terms that sadly have been avoided in this country since Justin Trudeau came to power. Lewis presented a vision of perfect moral clarity for a party that has long taken pride in its role as the progressive conscience of parliament. Then, even while offering all sympathy due to Notley, he encouraged the delegates to endorse a discussion of the Leap Manifesto — a plan that would halt all pipelines and eventually force the end of all fossil fuel development, and one which counts Lewis’s son Avi among its foremost proponents.

Both leaders received the full-throated praise of the 1,700 delegates in the hall. Both are widely respected among their ideological contemporaries. And both presented visions that are fundamentally at odds with one another.

Rachel Notley has implemented one of the most progressive climate-change policies in the country. It’s a thorough, technocratic protocol that levies a province-wide carbon tax, phases out coal-fired electricity plants and imposes a hard emissions cap on the oil sands.

Stephen Lewis wants the party to debate and adopt a 1,300-word anti-capitalist manifesto about transitioning to sustainable energy, somehow.

Rachel Notley has formed government and holds power.

Stephen Lewis has not, and will never.

Nature doesn’t create metaphors more perfect than this.

When that very same Leap Manifesto resolution hit the convention floor on Sunday morning, NDP delegates didn’t choose Rachel Notley. They chose Stephen Lewis. And in doing so, they advertised just how seriously they expect to be taken in a bid for government. The answer: Not very.

By voting in favour of a motion to debate the manifesto at the riding association level — thus making it the framework that will guide the party’s renewal — not only did the federal party rank-and-file do real harm to Notley’s credibility in Alberta, they also demonstrated they are seeking not governance, but revolution. Inspired by the emergence (if not actual success) of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, they proved they’re not looking for practical solutions to climate change or poverty, but rather treating politics as experiential.

It’s not about winning, it’s about feeling right.

These New Democrats want to be swept up in a movement that feels bigger than themselves, not stuck slogging through the actual drudgery of making viable pipeline policy, nor trusted with the responsibility for the many livelihoods that will thrive or dwindle as a result of that policy.

The problem with the Leap Manifesto is not that it is too radical per se, it’s that it is vacuous and dumb. It heralds the evils of climate change without any serious or viable proposals to manage that problem; it rails against privately run resource companies while winking vaguely at “innovative ownership structures, democratically run.” It trumpets the need to transition to a green economy without providing any clarity about exactly how government policy can or should affect that shift.

It all sounds lovely, but there is no there there. Surely it has escaped no one that only the Green Party and a faction of the NDP has taken the manifesto at all seriously since it was launched last year? The Leap Manifesto needed the credibility of the NDP more than the NDP needed the Leap Manifesto.

The NDP could have crafted its own comprehensive and comprehensible policy statements on these matters — policy that may even have been informed by Notley’s own work. Instead, the NDP tacitly endorsed what amounts to marketing pabulum from Naomi Klein’s publishing company. They’ve chosen to outsource their policy direction to self-promoting amateurs. The NDP has fallen for the same shallow, celebrity-driven politics for which they once so rightly derided the Liberals. It can be interpreted only as an act of extraordinary desperation.

And in doing so, the federal party cut the knees out from under its only standing success; Rachel Notley herself.

It took just hours for Alberta’s opposition to seize on the gift the federal NDP handed to them: “Premier Notley sold her carbon tax, coal industry shutdown and a cap on oil sands development to Albertans with the promise that it would provide the credibility we need to get opponents of pipelines on board — that these policies would get ‘social license,’” wrote Wildrose leader Brian Jean, in a statement. This is a leader who thinks that pandering to environmental concerns is pointless — and on Sunday, the NDP proved him right.

“Today Premier Notley’s social license experiment was put to the test and it failed. She wasn’t able to get her own party’s delegates, in her home city, to drop their opposition to getting Alberta’s resources to market.”

That one move gave Wildrose and the federal Conservatives all the ammunition they needed; Alberta NDP insiders fear the weekend’s events have already dropped them 10 points in the polls, and expect they’ll need up to a year to climb their way out of a hole they didn’t dig.

The federal and provincial parties are uniquely entwined. The Alberta NDP is constitutionally required to adopt its federal counterpart’s policies, a relationship that has just become untenable.

Don’t be surprised to see a resolution at the Alberta NDP’s own convention in June to formally cut ties with the federal party.

Tactically, there is no other option for Notley now but to turn her back on what is about to become a politically toxic, Corbyn-esque tire fire.

After this weekend, enough key members of the provincial wing are personally furious enough to light the match themselves.

If that happens, the federal New Democrats will have lost their beachhead in oil country, and their claim to their pragmatic prairie roots

If that happens, the federal New Democrats will have lost their beachhead in oil country, and their claim to their pragmatic prairie roots.

Many who attended this weekend’s convention walked away with sympathy for Thomas Mulcair. This was a party that was happy to abandon its principles and embrace a more centrist approach when they thought that doing so would help them win.

The second power proved unattainable, they abandoned the leader they had chosen, sacrificing him like the fool king in a bid to regain the favour of more radical gods.

But at least Mulcair had a chance and earned his loss.

The leader we really should feel sorry for is Rachel Notley. Her own party cheered to her face and then slit her throat for a shout-out in Naomi Klein’s next book.