Meet your new Quebec NDP caucus.

The jokes write themselves. Will they vote for a national nap time program? Will Jack Layton implement the buddy system to get them to work? And how can they talk to Canadians when they’re not allowed to talk to strangers?

Among the NDP’s 57 new MPs, nine are baby-faced graduates, some of whom are just out of University and one who probably still belongs in high school.

The dissolution of the Bloc Quebecois gave way to what appears to be a rather mindless shift to the NDP, as evidenced by the fact residents in Quebec did not even bother to check what candidates they were voting for.

Pierre-Luc Dusseault, who captured 43 per cent of the vote in the riding of Sherbrooke, is a month shy of his twentieth birthday, having only just completed his first year of University. He becomes the youngest MP in Canadian history and the new centrefold for Barely Legal Canadian Politician Magazine.

More bizarre still is the story about Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who decided to go to Las Vegas during her own campaign in Berthier-Maskinoge, a region of the country she doesn’t live. Even worse, Brosseau can not parle Francais, but it didn’t stop her from defeating incumbent Bloc Quebecois MP by 6,000 votes.

There are other stories similar to the above, with NDP candidates winning in Quebec despite having no political experience, never mind very little life experience. The sudden changes in fortune for the party appear to be more a philosophical change of heart than one rooted in the campaign efforts of the challengers.

I’m not sure what this says about our democracy, when a group of neophyte nobodies can win jobs that pay a base compensation of $157,000 by simply entering their names on a campaign form. As noted by others, Dusseault can qualify for his pension in six years, giving new life to the term “Freedom 25.”

Prime minister Stephen Harper wants to call the House back into session by mid-May, but the NDP said they aren’t ready with 57 new MPs to train. I assume they mean potty train. As I said, the jokes write themselves, good and bad.

I don’t really feel so bad any more about not voting. After all, I could have done worse. I could have elected a 19-year-old.

All jokes aside, it’s just as well Jack’s newly minted MPs are as green as their favourite Sesame Street puppet, since the four years they will serve in opposition voting on bills of no consequence will be invaluable experience.

The greater fear would have been 57 rookies expected to lead a minority government, something the province of Quebec doesn’t seem to have cared much about when they cast caution into the wind and stabbed blindly in the polling booth.

This really puts paid to the myth that in order to attract the best and brightest talent to politics we have to compensate people with exorbitant salaries and generous benefits.

But so long as Ottawa is looking for young people with no practical political experience, I humbly offer my services. After all, unlike Dusseault, I can actually legally drink if I need to visit the United States.

Photo: AFP

I suppose some readers might be here to gloat about the Conservative majority and see if I’m lamenting the fact Canadians finally gave them the complete trust to lead the nation as they see fit. If so, they may be disappointed.

Although I don’t believe the party deserved this majority, it is gladly received for it will put to the test the question of how conservative this Conservative party really is.

There are many reasons to celebrate a Conservative majority. For the first time in five years the party won’t be able to make excuses and justifications for choosing expedience over principle. They have the political capital to make real priorities and the power to put their proclaimed visions for Canada into action.

With that power comes responsibility. Although I don’t expect radical changes — indeed, I suspect this will put paid to the myth of the hidden agenda once and for all — I do expect a greater amount of fiscal prudence and restraint.

This is a government who chose to inject billions of dollars into the economy during the recession in the belief it would stimulate the country back to prosperity. The jury is out on whether that worked, but the fact is that the government would have gone deeply into deficit with or without the stimulus spending.

We are now almost $100-billion above the spending budget of the 2005 Paul Martin government, and even if you take all of the military spending increases into account, there’s absolutely no reason we should increase the country’s budget by 33 per cent over six years.

Indeed, Maxime Bernier said just last July that the government should aim for a $250-billion ceiling with zero growth (and that’s zero growth without adjustments for inflation, population and GDP increase). The 2011 budget was nearly $50-billion larger than that.

So there’s finally hope for fiscal conservatives in a political party that has made every possible excuse to explain why it has had to outspend all previous governments in the history of the nation both as a percent increase and as a sum total.

It would also be a good time to start cutting government largesse, trimming programs and finding efficiency where there is undeniable fat. Fat that was put into place by this government.

Now the true test begins for the Conservatives. Can they finally implement policies that are true to the principles of the patient and faithful base who have endured the incremental shift to the centre to usurp the Liberals?

The strategy, it should be noted, has been a resounding success. The move to the centre pushed the Liberals to the left where they clashed with the NDP, ultimately leading to an exodus of soft support for the Liberals on both the right and the left.

The rise of the NDP can be attributed to the Conservative strategy to become the Natural Governing Party in the centre, leaving the Liberals with nowhere to go but implode.

In its place is a strong but ultimately impotent NDP, who will now symbolically represent the opposition in a House of Commons where it can defeat no votes. Still, they have to be pretty pleased with themselves.

A fortuitous coalescence of a weakening Liberal Party and a weak Liberal leader resulted in the near devastation of that party tonight. As if it were not embarrassing enough that Michael Ignatieff’s failure exceeded his predecessor Stephane Dion, at least the former leader won his seat tonight. The future for the former Harvard professor looks grim.

But it wasn’t just the collapse of the Liberals that was satisfying. The separatist party who formed the most unpleasant ally in the axis of “socialists and losers” also saw the death of sovereignty in Quebec tonight.

Gilles Duceppe accepted responsibility and defeat more humbly than his Liberal counterpart, stepping down. (Updated: Ignatieff resigned Tuesday). The Liberals and Bloc Quebecois now present a mere 37-seat coalition.

Last, and perhaps least, in the election “nobody wanted”, Elizabeth May secured the first seat for the Green Party in British Columbia. Proving what, I don’t know. Perhaps it was sympathy for having excluded her from the televised debates for yet another year. Voters are nothing if not vindictive and unpredictable in their predilections.

A Conservative majority now offers a hope for Canadians that hasn’t been available for decades. After years of reckless spending, government largesse, bloated programs, increased bureaucracy and hazardous government intervention, the Conservatives have a chance to scale back the obscene dependence Canadians have on the state.

Though I don’t expect miracles, I demand some inkling that their protestations of being hampered by the opposition were true. We can begin that good faith by eliminating the vote subsidies, which precipitated the massive about-face of the Conservatives in 2008.

It should be an interesting next four years.

I’m not going to pretend that today requires my vote in some critical history-changing way. Everybody already knows where I stand on the issue, I trust. So although I’m going to enjoy watching as the results and analysis comes in on our new NDP prime minister (I jest) I don’t plan on influencing either.

I do think that the best article that has been penned on this subject so far comes from a fiscal conservative after my own heart, Lawrence Solomon:

It’s a free country. Don’t vote if you don’t want to, no matter how many people try to badger or bully you into rearranging your day to suit their agenda. If they’d rather stand in line for an hour or two to cast a ballot that has a one-in-a-trillion chance of being the deciding vote, more power to them. If you’d rather enjoy a beer with your buddies or catch up on your chores, more power to you.

On a more important note, has Barack Obama really lost his mind? First he thinks it’s important to ensure Muslim sensibilities are not inflamed (a near impossible task) by refusing to show body evidence of the death of one of history’s biggest mass murderers. Then he quietly gives that same murderer a proper religious funeral at sea before the body has been displayed for all to see.

These Yanks have no idea what they’re doing. Billy Shakespeare knows how to display a tyrant:

SIWARD
He’s worth no more
They say he parted well, and paid his score:
And so, God be with him! Here comes newer comfort.
Re-enter MACDUFF, with MACBETH’s head

MACDUFF
Hail, king! for so thou art: behold, where stands
The usurper’s cursed head: the time is free:
I see thee compass’d with thy kingdom’s pearl,
That speak my salutation in their minds;
Whose voices I desire aloud with mine:
Hail, King of Scotland!

It would seem that many of the pundits and plaudits have endorsed their favourite candidate or party for the imminent 2011 election. As one who predicted on Jan. 1 that no such election would even be happening, it would be consistent that whoever or whatever I endorse will lose.

The Conservatives lost my vote a long time ago, when they turned principle on its side in favour of political power and broke their 2008 election promise. For almost anyone and everyone I’ve spoken to, they don’t seem to have a problem with the shamelessness of this act.

Nobody could have known the extent of the financial meltdown, they will say. Nobody could have anticipated the sort of economic upheaval and revenue shortfalls that would result in the massive deficits that the Conservative government authored in 2009 and 2010, they will say. But I have little sympathy for that argument.

Stephen Harper was unequivocal in his promise to never go into deficit spending, under any circumstances, ever again. Believing him to be a man of principle, I voted for the party in 2008. It won’t happen again, or at least not until “regime change” puts someone with more conviction behind his own absolutist statements.

Had the man said he would prefer not to go into deficit, or would try his best not to, it could be something. But the only way the Conservatives could win the previous election was to run on the simplistic platform that it was the only political party not offering an economic collapse, juxtaposing itself to the grossly negligent Liberal Party and their Green Shift.

Sound familiar? They’re doing pretty much the same thing this year. And though I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea the Conservatives would run the fiscal ship better than the Liberals, and certainly better than the NDP, when you’re setting record debt levels it comes as little consolation.

It isn’t just the deficits either. It’s the way the Conservatives do business in power. They’re controlling, secretive, openly contemptuous of procedure, disrespectful, assumptive, patronizing and self-serving. It isn’t so much what they say as how they say it, as the old expression goes.

So more of the same doesn’t seem very appealing at all. More contempt for what Canadians think, the media who inform them and the voters who believed their lies. As a voter I couldn’t in good conscience go with them, even though I believe they may be least damaging to the country.

In some respects I agree with Andrew Coyne’s invented dichotomy of how badly the opposition parties might ruin the economy versus how badly the Conservatives might ruin democracy. But in the end he endorses the Liberal Party, who under Michael Ignatieff might just represent one of the weakest political choices since Kim Campbell.

Clearly the Liberals are not a serious choice for Canadians, hence the reason the NDP are polling at nearly 30 per cent of the electorate for a full week now. And though the NDP have the most unrealistic economic plan of all the choices, there is an allure there for many voters in the same way the allure existed for disaffected voters in Ontario in 1990. Sick of the blue and red, voters gambled with orange. Unfortunately for Ontario that was a poor gamble.

The NDP do not present a viable alternative for anybody with an ounce of fiscal conservatism. Their party is full of people who have program wish lists that would quickly bleed the federal coffers and require either an increase in taxes or a reduction in spending, likely coming from such unpopular places as the military. We don’t need one anyway, right?

The Green Party isn’t worth considering even as a protest vote, steeped as they are in the irrelevant environmental activism of a carbon tax economy, which has already proven a staggering failure in British Columbia. It isn’t just that the Green Party has no hope of becoming relevant soon, but the leadership under Elizabeth May has pushed it from a mainstream centrist party of sustainability (a good idea in and of itself) to a fringe leftwing group echoing similar NDP-Liberal policies that already exist.

What choice remains then? Well, none. But that’s still a choice. On May 2, I intend to walk into a voting booth and select nobody, as that is precisely who is out there representing my interests right now. Should that change in future elections I’ll certainly consider it. But Monday is a vote for a more representative democracy, beginning with my expression of contempt for what it is now.

As one who has actually been to Afghanistan and seen how the military cares for and treats detainees, it’s a little difficult to swallow the news that the International Criminal Court could investigate Canada for so-called war crimes. I’m not sure what that would accomplish, but it certainly would do nothing to help with the main problem in the country: the insurgency.

I’m unsure as to how or why anybody believes that Canada’s role in Afghanistan is anything more than a humanitarian mission buttressed by security. We’re in the country to provide stabilization for the democratically elected (thought admittedly corrupt and fraudulent) government with whom we have specific agreements and rules we must follow.

In providing security to Afghans we are not allowed to hold Afghan nationals for more than 96 hours in our custody, though at the time of the allegations (pre-2007) this was 72 or 48 hours.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to expect a foreign military with finite resources to ensure absolute humanitarian oversight of detainees after they’ve been handed over to the Afghan government. That’s like expecting a police officer in Canada to ensure proper oversight of a prisoner he has arrested and brought to justice. Is a police officer morally culpable if a prisoner is raped in prison?

The answer in Afghanistan appears to be yes, but only if the arresting party knew that the prisoner would be likely to be exposed to harm. Well, in Canada we know that many prisoners are likely to be exposed to violence and rape in prison as a matter of routine consequence. So, again, who is responsible in a moral sense? The system allowing the rape and violence? Or the police officer doing his job?

Even worse, most Canadians are not aware that the charges facing us are based upon the 2005 agreement signed by Prime Minister Paul Martin and General Rick Hillier with the Afghan government, which did not include the sort of oversight that exists in the revamped 2007 agreement. The system now is very clean and involves oversight from third party humanitarian agencies, in particular the International Red Cross, who has said it presently has no issues with Canada or any other NATO member.

But what bothers me the most is we are seeing torture through a very narrow prism of self-interest. Canadians only seem to be interested in the kind of torture taking place in which Canada may have had an indirect hand, but not torture in the broader context and problem that it is in Central Asia. The facts remain and are borne out in many studies, that although torture is ubiquitous in Central Asia, it has been significantly reduced since the fall of the Taliban, and detainees captured by NATO enjoy perhaps the highest exemptions from mistreatment of any Afghan citizen.

According to a 2009 International Red Cross Survey, those Afghans who report having been tortured has dropped to 29 per cent from 43 per cent in 1999 during the Taliban rule. That one in three Afghans have still reported being tortured in some manner is disturbing, but it does provide a more contextual analysis than the cherry-picking of detainees who went through Canadian custody.

The Canadian military is also relatively savvy to what irks the population back home, which is why it now usually brings along ANA soldiers or ANP police who can take detainees directly into custody without ever having changed hands from Canadian to Afghan authority. In this manner, because Canadians are only interested in torture if it occurs to detainees who went through our control, our military can never be “complicit” in torture. Never mind if torture occurs independently of Canadian involvement.

What is more perverse than any of this is the fact that Canada would be investigated for third-party complicity in war crimes, when there’s a foe out there that has little qualms about murdering women and children indiscriminately. It’s difficult to bring to trial an insurgent army that has signed no international agreements and abides by no rules of international law.

There’s a reason why Canada has lost its appetite for humanitarian work in Afghanistan and it’s because we have focused so much on how well the Taliban have been treated in Afghan custody that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. Public morale has been sapped by such gross distortions of our work over there that at this point it makes little sense to try explaining or justifying it any more.

Our military has a job to do and it will continue to do it in the same professional manner it has since the beginning, until it is called back home. What the International Criminal Court rules is of little consequence to anyone.

The headline isn’t meant to be offensive to the NDP leader. It’s just the bizarre circumstances that has thrust the man, for whom the moniker was invented for his stance on Afghanistan, to a close second in the latest political polls.

The orange revolution or orange crush, whichever you prefer, has culminated with the newest poll showing the NDP within the statistical margin of error of reaching the front-running Conservative Party.

The latest Forum Research poll shows the NDP polling at 31 per cent, just three points back from the Conservatives, while the woeful Liberal Party is down to 22 per cent under the frail leadership of Michael Ignatieff. Indeed, it’s only the former Harvard professor who doesn’t seem to realize how far his party has plummeted as soft Liberal support has decidedly moved to the NDP in the past week.

Ignatieff is once again openly discussing the possibility of leading a coalition government following the imminent demise of the Liberals in next week’s election. The only problem with that scenario is the NDP would have little incentive to allow Ignatieff to lead the government while finishing in a dismal third place. No, that honour would fall to Jack.

Given that 34 per cent is only 3 per cent lower than the 2008 Conservative showing, the NDP fortunes can only really be attributed to Michael Ignatieff’s inability to connect with Canadians. In fact, the public appetite for the bushy-browed leader is so feeble that the party is polling six points below one of the worst showings in Liberal history, accomplished by the charismatically-challenged Stephane Dion.

The orange revolution is not a blip on the radar either, as the latest Ekos poll shows the NDP trailing the Conservatives by six points, but still solidly in second place with a six point lead on the lowly Liberals.

The most optimistic numbers show the NDP growing to a staggering 108 seats in the House of Commons, with Jack moving into Stornoway and forming the official opposition. The Liberals would be reduced to 60 seats, and the Bloc Quebecois nearly decimated to three seats. Combined, the coalition would have 171 seats to 137 for the Conservatives, meaning the government could be formed without the help of the separatists, but an NDP-heavy cabinet.

The idea of both an NDP opposition or coalition government led by the NDP has to send shivers down the spines of many a voter. Although the Conservatives haven’t exactly been the best fiscal stewards during the past three years, much of their spending was wholeheartedly endorsed by the other parties, who demanded stimulus during the recession. Much of the the most vocal calls for spending were made by NDP MPs in the House of Commons.

It’s already been admitted by the party that an NDP government wouldn’t be able to bash its round peg platform into the square hole of economic reality, nor do I suspect the NDP really ever expected to have to make good on many of its hare-brained promises.

Gone, however, is the belief the NDP would sap away Liberal support, enabling the Conservatives to win their long-coveted majority. Instead, it would seem that a flood of hand-sitting voters from 2008 decided to make it out to vote in the advance polls, with a record 2 million people casting their votes over the Easter weekend.

Although the most likely scenario is another Conservative minority, the NDP winning second place is a permanent game-changer, and could be just the thing to set off a leftwing coalition government. The polls leading up to voting day are going to make the election nobody wanted very exciting. Ironically, if the NDP do manage to win over enough votes in the final week to form the government, we could see the Liberals and Conservatives form a coalition of their own to stop the economic insanity of the NDP from prevailing.

Photograph by: Bryanna Bradley, Montreal Gazette

The federal NDP are backtracking on some environmental promises they made in their own economic platform for the first year if they were to form the next government. The party has since explained that the $3.6 billion in green spending would have to be delayed to coincide with revenue from a cap and trade carbon system that has yet to be implemented.

“We do indeed propose that revenues from pricing carbon (dioxide emissions) be put back into improving the environment — that’s how carbon use will be reduced,” the NDP stated in a press release. “If revenues from pricing carbon are delayed or are lower than planned, then the investments will also be delayed or will be phased in more slowly than planned.”

It should be noted that the NDP have criticized other political parties, but in particular the Conservatives, for not being able to provide concrete plans and numbers to price carbon or develop a sound environmental plan. Now it looks like the NDP are guilty of the same kind of flimflammery.

That isn’t surprising. No political party in its right mind would want to scare away voters by committing to solid industry-killing environmental plans other than the Green Party, who rightfully is poised to win zero seats on May 2. If the Conservatives have been evasive about an environmental plan, it’s because nobody can square the circle that is slamming the same corporate industry that provides the jobs each party leader is promising they can deliver.

But beyond that, the NDP know they don’t have to actually create realistic deliverables, which is why most of the time they serve as a good opposition party to whichever government is in power. They can advocate for any unrealistic spending program and policy because at the end of the day they don’t have to answer for it.

This is not unlike the manner in which the unions that support the NDP operate with the workers they represent. The unions aren’t responsible for the fiscal solvency of a corporation, so they’ll ask for whatever they believe they can get and not worry about how it affects the company. That’s part of the reason for the automotive industry collapse — though certainly not the whole reason — the unions thought that good times would always exist, or more probably they didn’t care.

An NDP party isn’t really advocating for government policy that is necessarily realistic, so much as it is presenting the kind of policies that will serve as opposition advocacy to the ruling party. It’s not possible to fulfil the kind of promises they make, and any rudimentary examination of their platform confirms this.

Having said that, occasionally the world goes crazy and the unlikeliest candidate with the most unrealistic promises wins. No, I’m not referring to Barack Obama, though that is a good example. I’m talking about the Ontario NDP under the Bob Rae government.

By the time Rae got into power he had made so many promises to workers and unions that the NDP had no choice but to make good on many of its fiscally incompetent policies, including social spending, social housing and tax increases. When the deficit soared to $9 billion, Rae tried to make pragmatic cuts to the public sector, ultimately alienating his own base.

The problem is the NDP are caught between two worlds and there’s little way to bridge them. On the one hand they want to make the kind of promises and offer the alternatives that is quite blatantly sapping soft Liberal support away in the polls. But on the other hand they must be cognizant that the more viable an alternative the party becomes, the more closely scrutinized and debunked their economic platform will be.

An NDP in the OLO, however, can be just as dangerous as one in power. If election day puts Jack Layton in Stornoway — the ultimate humiliation for Ignatieff by the way — then the party would be more than just a power broker in a minority government. It would be able to foist each of its infeasible policies on the Conservatives and use the Bloc Quebecois as further leverage. It would even put Layton in a strong bargaining position for a coalition agreement.

Only a Conservative majority will really render the NDP surge irrelevant. That, or election day restores the NDP to their former obscurity as panic sets in and the tide moves back to the red.

And here’s the proof:

Boy, life in Sweden must be really bad if it’s worse than here, where Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are destroying Canada.

Michael Ignatieff shakes the hand of protester Lee Asher and promises her that a Liberal government would work to free Pavel Kulisek. Photograph by: Adrian MacNair (click for high resolution)

I was in North Vancouver today doing a freelance job for a community newspaper when I saw a crowd gathering at Lower Lonsdale. Getting closer to it I could see demonstrators asking for “justice for Pavel Kulisek” with signs being waved by adults and children alike. I knew what it was about. I had read the news regarding Kulisek’s incarceration in Mexico for the past three years.

As it turned out, Michael Ignatieff was due to arrive in North Vancouver for a campaign stop. Stepping out of the bus he was flanked by protesters and by activist Lee Asher, who spoke to the Liberal leader for several minutes before shaking hands. After Ignatieff promised to free Kulisek should the Liberals form the next government, he continued into the building where he was rallying for North Vancouver Liberal candidate Taleeb Noormohamed.

I interviewed Asher afterward and this is what she said:

Mr.Ignatieff told me that he was outraged by the case and he thinks that it’s absolutely imperative that the Canadian government do something about it. So I asked Mr.Ignatieff what are the steps in the Canadian government to do something about this. He basically told me that he needs to assemble a team of people to go in, visit Pavel, let us know that he’s healthy. I stopped Mr.Ignatieff and told him we already know Pavel’s not healthy, we already know that it’s a crisis level, so what are the next steps that we need to do. And he told me that a phone call needs to be made to the Mexican Ambassador. I asked him who makes that phone call and he said the prime minister does.

So what’s interesting for me is that the Canadian government releases statements telling us they can do nothing with a sovereign country, we have to wait for the due process, but Mr.Ignatieff just told me right now that the prime minister can make a phone call to the Mexican government and can intervene.

Asher added that she believes Ignatieff would intervene because she shook her hand and made a promise, and that it’s on the record for all to see. She said a reelected Conservative government would, in her mind, have “no inkling at all to bring Pavel home.”

Click on the photo gallery below to see high resolution photos:

BONUS COINCIDENCE

Terry Milewski was doing a standup as I walked away. When I took his photo he explained there was no need because he’ll be on TV later. To which I replied, “yeah but nobody is going to get a photo like this.”

John Ivison is an often underrated political columnist who really hits the nail on the head every once in a while. His Saturday column on Ignatieff needing to stop talking about Ignatieff is one perfect example of his perceptive proficiencies.

As every political poll, survey and focus group has told him, Michael Ignatieff has failed miserably to build his image and brand as successfully as Stephen Harper. In fact, he’s failed so badly that only fringe party leader Elizabeth May has a less alluring leadership brand.

And of all the things that have hampered Ignatieff, nothing has been so pronounced as his expatriate days when Canada was little more than a vacation home to return to and renew his membership card. As Ivison writes, “it reminds voters that here is a man who is not like them,” in any way shape or form. Regardless of how many times the man tries to explain it in soft light video with archival footage of Harvard, he only serves to further validate the “just visiting” charge from the Conservatives.

But that’s the fault of the Liberal war room. They don’t seem to be able to perceive that the greatest asset of the Liberal leader isn’t what he provides, but what he doesn’t provide: the cult of personality that Stephen Harper has built around himself.

The Liberals are never going to match Ignatieff with Harper in some political gladitorial showdown, as the prime minister is going to win that match every single time. It isn’t about intelligence or experience or wisdom. Some people just “have it” and with Ignatieff, baby, you don’t have it.

What they’re missing, however, is the chance to juxtapose the Liberal brand as precisely the opposite to what many Canadians have come to dislike and distrust about the Conservatives. Instead of promoting the Liberal leader as the central brand, focus on branding the political party as a group of people all working equally toward some common goal.

Instead of the centralizing power of the Conservatives where all political messages have to be filtered through the PMO and Party HQ, where party candidates and workers have to be vetted for common media interviews, the Liberals could focus on being what the Conservatives are not.

The contrast could be remarkable if done properly. Ignatieff could step back and say that it isn’t about him, it’s about Canada and the kind of vision all 308 candidates have for a Liberal vision of the country. The Liberal brand is obviously enduring enough that it can hold a quarter of the electoral loyalty, despite having a weak leader for much of the past half decade.

Of course, that will never happen. Because part of the reason the Conservative strategy works is that it’s true. Ignatieff didn’t come back to Canada to stand out of the spotlight and campaign for a better Canada on ideas alone. He came back to be coronated as the returning monarch of Canada by virtue of his superior human qualities.

And even if that can’t be articulated on a perfectly logical plane of thought, it is the gnawing instinct of mistrust that is what most likely provides the negative feedback loop the Liberals are receiving in polls.