Canada will hold elections on October 19, and polls currently show a three-way tie. Conservative Stephen Harper has been in power for nine years and is weighed down by a recession brought on by low commodity prices. For months, he has trailed both the New Democrats, a socialist party backed by public-sector unions, and the Liberals, a center-left party headed by Justin Trudeau, the son of a famous prime minister.

But as summer ends and voter attention rises, the Conservatives are making a mild comeback. This week, a Forum poll of 1402 Canadian voters found Harper’s Conservatives at 32 percent, the NDP at 30 percent and the Liberals at 28 percent. The poll projects Conservatives will win the largest number of seats in Parliament and have a shot at forming a minority government.

One reason that the New Democrats are fading is that for all the smooth talk that party leader Thomas Mulcair makes of spending restraint and small-business tax breaks, his party’s core principles keep peeking out from behind the party’s PR curtain.

This week, over 100 prominent NDP supporters used the Toronto Film Festival as a venue to issue a radical proposal called the “Leap Manifesto.” It calls for a dramatic restructuring of Canada’s capitalist economy and demands that Canada end all use of fossil fuels by 2050. The document was signed by a bevy of Canadian celebrities including musicians Neil Young, Alanis Morissette, and Leonard Cohen, and actors Donald Sutherland, Rachel McAdams, and Ellen Page. They were joined by prominent environmentalists, labor-union leaders, and other left-wing activists.

While the manifesto was instigated by climate-change activist Naomi Klein, its reach goes far beyond controlling carbon emissions. ITC’s for “immigration status and full protection for all workers”; a debate about adopting a “universal basic income” for all citizens; higher taxes on “corporations and wealthy people”; a national child-care program; an end to economic austerity measures; public support for “Indigenous Peoples”; the control of energy sources by communities, rather than private companies; a more “ecologically-based” agriculture system; and “expanding the sectors of our economy that are already low carbon: caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media.”

Klein insists that the manifesto shouldn’t be viewed as a political document: “The truth is it’s an entirely non-partisan effort,” she told reporters, despite the fact that the vast preponderance of signatories are NDP supporters.

Mark Steyn, a prominent Canadian writer, scoffs at such evasive maneuvers. “The Leap Manifesto would be a leap backwards into poverty and perverse outcomes,” he said at a Gatestone Institute lunch in New York City this week. “This is the socialist, public-sector-union agenda boldly spelled out just before the elections.”

The NDP, desperately trying to appeal to centrist voters, is less than thrilled by the manifesto’s launch, especially since one of its biggest backers is Stephen Lewis, the former head of the NDP in Canada’s largest province, Ontario. Lewis bluntly claims the Leap Manifesto is essentially NDP policy. “For the New Democrats, it’s an extension of the kinds of things they’ve been talking about,” he told reporters this week.

The Globe and Mail, a large centrist newspaper in Canada, was blunt about the negative impact the manifesto could have on the moderate image that NDP leader Tom Mulcair is cultivating: “Saddling him now, barely a month from the election, with the task of answering questions about a revolutionary utopian manifesto seems like an obvious case of failing to look before you . . . well, you know the rest.”