Provincial Split Personalities

Recently in the BC Provincial NDP, there has been a spirited backroom debate about where the party should be headed, between moderates who currently hold most of the power and believe we need to chart a more centrist course, and the progressive activists who believe the party has departed too far from its roots to properly engage the masses. Much ink from far more well known bloggers and journalists has already been spilled on the topic, so I shall be brief in my own dissertation.
I would count myself among the progressives. The fact is that if we in the NDP pursue Liberal-lite policies, the electorate is simply going to vote for a real Liberal instead of one of us pretending to be one of them. We need to stick back to our roots and support those who have always been part of the bedrock of our party. Furthermore, our attempt to shift rightward hasn't been entirely matched by our policies; we're now stuck in a situation in which we say one thing, but our policy priorities don't reflect it, and it makes the party look confused. We cannot be the party of balanced budgets AND the party of all the social security programs we champion AND be the party that lowers taxes, the three are simply incompatible with each other, short of manufacturing money and causing inflation catastrophes. The party should focus instead on being the party of zero unemployment. We can solve so many of the provinces problems if we simply sit back and end unemployment, both our province's fiscal fortunes and our citizens' well-being can be improved in this manner.
Specifically, through public works projects, perhaps capital works designed to construct low income housing in major urban and rural areas, unemployed and underemployed persons can be given paying jobs that not only would take them off the employment insurance rolls, but would also cause them to be taxpaying citizens again, doubly helping the financial statements of the BC Government. Furthermore, by focusing this kind of stimulus on infrastructure and programs devoted to the worse off in society, we give these people a chance to climb out of poverty.
Such a program would, after an initial infusion of government dollars, begin to pay for itself through the taxes paid by the newly employed and the savings that would be created from employment insurance, and other government programs that would no longer be needed to support these persons. This kind of program that thinks big and has long term benefits has been sorely lacking from the NDP policy platform, and is completely consistant with the tenets of the party to support the average British Columbian. The fact that such a program would cost less over time due to the benefits of having people work is simply a side effect that our party's centrists can latch onto as a basis for funding such a building program.