Uhhh, not exactly, Charley; the NDP has the second-largest caucus in Parliament, which is not at all the same thing.

The Liberal Party of Canada is a massive old warhorse of an organization with tens of thousands of card-carrying members, many of them signed up for ten bucks a head as the riding associations cranked up for a party convention. Its tentacles reach into every city, town, village and wide spot on the highway from coast to coast to coast.

The NDP, on the other hand, is just emerging from 50 years of dependence on organized labour for both funding and popular support, which meant that it moved away from its rural origins in the Commonwealth Cooperative Federation to become an urban movement anchored in southern Ontario. It has very little grassroots support in Quebec, the North or in rural ridings anywhere in Canada.