When did the NDP stop being the party of guys in hard hats and start being the party of environmentalist snobs at Star-bucks?

I despise communism, but there is one aspect of it that I actually miss: The belief in industry.

As in, they loved factories. They loved development. They loved mining and forestry and building things.

They weren't very good at it -- the communist system was at odds with human nature; you can't centrally plan an economy, you can't command people to be inspired to live your blueprint -- but they were crystal clear about their goals: An industrialized society with high productivity.

Admiring hard work --physical work, outdoors work, blue-collar work --isn't a left-wing thing. In fact, it's conservative.

Bizarrely, though, it's not a big part of today's NDP.

Exhibit A: Last week, the Saskatchewan NDP voted unanimously to oppose the Keystone XL pipe-line project, a shovel-ready project that needs no government stimulus, that would not only create jobs in Saskatchewan in terms of the pipeline itself, but is necessary to export oil from Saskatchewan's Bakken oil fields. Those oil fields are why there is more conventional -- that is, non-oilsands oil --production in Saskatchewan now than in Alberta.

It's why Saskatchewan has the lowest unemployment rate in Canada.

Some of that work is unionized. Some isn't. But so what. It's work. It's very well-paid work. But the NDP --once the party of the working man --is against it?

It's not just them. In British Columbia, their NDP just sent a unanimous letter to the federal regulatory review panel, opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline to the B.C. west coast.

Sorry, we can't all make a living selling Starbucks drinks to each other and texting to each other on our iPhones about how awful Stephen Harper is. Someone actually has to make stuff. Like iPhones. Someone has to bring that coffee to Vancouver. On a ship that is powered by heavy oil.

We can't all live a metalife, just being intellectual and witty and great critics of things. Someone has to actually be a builder, a miner, a logger, a labourer. At least the communists valued labour --they worshipped it, actually.

Today's NDP derides it, looks down its nose at it, demeans it, laughs at it, even though those are the real six-figure jobs in Canada --while the fancy kids, getting their degrees in urban studies and peace studies and vegetarian studies, will graduate qualified to do nothing but work at Starbucks.

The NDP is like a child who thinks electricity comes not from a hydroelectric dam or a coal-fired power plant or a nuclear reactor, but from "a plug in the wall."