Thomas Mulcair finally did it.

After years of speculation from left-wing activists and even the mainstream Canadian media, the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP) was quoted comparing the party’s approach to that of Tony Blair and New Labour.

This hardly comes as a shock to those of us who watched the NDP change its constitution’s preamble at its 2013 convention, with the required two-thirds majority voting for the alteration. The previous preamble from the mid-1980s, which called the NDP a democratic socialist party and called for social ownership of the economy, was replaced with a more conservative declaration that rejected social ownership and relegated democratic socialism to merely a “tradition.”