What’s driving New Democrats in the West away from Jagmeet Singh’s NDP

globalnews.ca:

Earlier this week, Edmonton MLA Rakhi Pancholi said that buying a membership in the party she hopes to lead — the Alberta NDP — should not automatically bring a membership in the party Jagmeet Singh leads — the federal NDP — as it does now.

And even before that, the Alberta NDP and Saskatchewan NDP took it upon themselves to issue a joint statement denouncing a proposal made by federal NDP MP Charlie Angus that New Democrats in those two provinces saw as an unhelpful and inappropriate anti-oil-and-gas idea.

These were the latest examples of growing friction between Western New Democrats and their eastern and mostly federal cousins. And if there is a future for the NDP in Canada, it certainly seems to be in the well-funded, politically powerful, more centrist and pragmatic provincial parties in the country’s four western provinces. In the West, it has been clear for some time that the only alternative to conservative parties in those provinces is the New Democrats.

Ontario’s NDP, despite having been the official opposition through two provincial parliaments, appears to have squandered the opportunity to set itself up as the natural alternative to the governing Progressive Conservatives in that province. From Quebec east through the Atlantic provinces, provincial New Democrats are non-existent to invisible.

But Western New Democrats have all tasted power and eager to do so again in the two provinces where they are on the opposition benches. In Saskatchewan this year, Carla Beck’s NDP appear poised to present her party’s best answer yet to the seemingly unbeatable Saskatchewan Party which has had an unbroken string of general election wins since 2007.

And now Pancholi — who has a better than even chance of becoming the next