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.

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.

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.

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.

The exclusion of two apparent Liberal party supporters from a Conservative campaign event in London, Ontario is being blamed on a sinister plot by the PMO to screen out opposition supporters. The story has even led Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to directly accuse Stephen Harper of demanding more rigorous background checks on people showing up at his campaign events than advisers he hires to work for him.

Ignatieff went on to tell reporters during a stop in Newfoundland that “you are in a very un-Canadian place” when people get barred from public meetings for being friends with him on Facebook. One of the women who said she was barred from the event had to pre-register for the rally and that’s how the Conservatives screened her out.

First off, it’s an obvious bit of turnabout being fair play for Ignatieff, who is taking the opportunity to mock Stephen Harper for his party’s own campaign against Ignatieff’s own allegiance to Canada. And it’s clear that he’s exploiting the situation to create his own media spotlight, happily granted by the mainstream press.

Second, it seems to be taken for granted that this was deliberate, and further indicative of the sort of contempt for democratic practices that the Conservatives have displayed in this country’s most hallowed institutions. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

But does it seem logical, or even practical, to screen every person who pre-registers for a campaign event, and then exclude them if they’re seen to belong to another party? Wouldn’t it seem more likely that the party would be less interested in the decided Conservative voters who will do little more than wave banners, and more interested in the kind of people who might be pursued to abandon Ignatieff and add a vote for the Conservatives?

Lost in the narrative of this whole exclusion story is the fact the Conservatives are on a campaign to win over the soft Liberal support that will grant them the majority government they so desperately covet. The idea that Stephen Harper is ordering the PMO to draw up lists of political enemies to exclude them from campaign rallies is about as ridiculous as it gets.

And if these women were excluded because of the Quixotic decision of one or more Conservative staffers, then it seems a little overdone to continue belabouring the point long after the party has issued a statement of apology and indicated it was a mistake. Assigning motives from the highest tiers of power to exclude potential voters from rallies is pretty much the textbook definition of Harper derangement syndrome.

Of course there is another, albeit equally implausible, version of events to this story. As ridiculous as it is to suspect the prime minister of trying to exclude voters from a campaign rally designed to gain more voters, is it at all possible the Liberal party hired young students to go to these rallies in order to make the claim they were denied entry?

I mean, is it at all possible that given the political fodder that has been made over the claims of two people in the entire country of Canada, that a calculation was made somewhere in Liberal party headquarters to further the conspiratorial theories that Stephen Harper’s anti-democratic government is out to be mean and nasty to young, innocent students?

Possible? Yes. Plausible? No. But neither is the sort of claims that are being given serious consideration by people who pretend to have serious minds in organizations that pretend to be serious dispensers of news.

The current selection of ideas being proposed by the usual faces in Ottawa has to be among the most deluded I’ve heard in quite some time. The only party that appears to be displaying any fiscal common sense is the Conservatives, and that’s only because they’re not going to open the floodgates again until 2015.

It’s positively bizarre, actually, to listen to the Conservative proposals for the 2011 election, since they all take place in 2015, or the year that Canada’s deficit will magically be balanced. From the announcements he’s made, one would think Stephen Harper was actually running in a different time period than the others. A $500 fitness tax credit and income-splitting are just two of the big ticket items voters can expect a half decade from now.

Whatever spending promises have been made by the Conservatives, however, they pale in comparison to those made by the “Nanny State Professor”, with $8 billion in big-ticket social spending over the next two years. And they’ll somehow be paid for without raising income taxes (which isn’t exactly true, since they plan to raise corporate rates back up to 18 per cent).

The Liberal plan is big on the party’s attempt to corral the family vote from the Conservatives, adding $8 billion in new spending. $1 billion would go toward Registered Education Savings Plans (which personally appeals to a parent like myself, since my RESP isn’t tax-deductible while RSPs are), $1.2 billion would go to daycare, $700 million to better GICs and $400 million to energy retrofits (which is a bit of a policy lift from the Conservatives).

To say the Liberal budget is unaffordable is an understatement, although this seems remarkably similar to the same sort of pie-in-the-sky promises made by the Ontario Liberals when Dalton McGuinty reached out to put a chicken in every pot that was hard done by the Harris era.

It would be one thing if we were running large surpluses for Ignatieff to make these kinds of spending promises, but during a deficit it is frankly irresponsible. The sheer enormity of it all suggests the platform is aimed more at election racketeering than good policy-making. The last thing we need are more social programs that can be expected to balloon in cost over the next decade.

As for Jack Layton, he’s mostly out-to-lunch as usual. He’d create a jobs program that would be funded by returning the corporate tax rate to 19.5 per cent, proving once again that socialists don’t understand the fundamentals of economics.

There is one aspect of the NDP spending platform that deserves a closer look. His $103 million promise to improve benefits for military veterans is admirable, and certainly affordable when compared to the fact the Conservative government is willing to spend $100 million on the commemoration of the war of 1812.

Not that Layton is really in this two-horse race. Nor is Ignatieff, if you look at the polls lately. But Harper is taking some deserved heat for saying today that he wouldn’t meet the Liberal leader in a man-to-man showdown in front of the cameras (though it has been pointed out that Sun TV is willing to accommodate when they launch in late April), giving CBC reporter Terry Milewski the opportunity to call him a chicken to his face.

The Conservatives are also constrained by the fact that they have said on the record they won’t change their budget, so the amount of vote-buying they can manage is limited to things that extend beyond the current budget projections, hence the reason for their bizarre tax promises in 2015.

Perhaps the best thing to hope for is a majority government, not because I believe the Conservatives deserve one, but because it would test once and for all the argument that the government’s fiscal credibility has been compromised by the demands of the opposition. That, and the fact we wouldn’t have to hear about unaffordable universal programs until sometime in 2015.

Photo credit: Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press

I have a feeling that Friday evening went down something like this. Michael Ignatieff got back to Liberal Party headquarters after standing in front of the media and equivocating about a coalition and was quite literally yelled at for being the smartest idiot in Canada.

Perhaps realizing the political damage of his faux pas, Ignatieff got up before the media on Saturday morning and made clear that he wouldn’t be forming a coalition should an election restore us to the same debilitating status quo of the past seven years. But it was too late.

The coalition is on the table now, and the Conservatives will use it to their utmost advantage. In the chess game of politics, Ignatieff left a pawn hanging and the Conservatives have happily gobbled it up to enjoy a material advantage.

That isn’t to say that Ignatieff doesn’t want the Liberals to win a minority government of their own, as unlikely as such a prospect might be at this moment. But I think it’s safe to say that Friday’s press conference told us everything we really needed to know about the possibility of a backup plan if the election goes anything like the polls are currently indicating.

Curiously, the talk in the media today has nothing to do with the Ignatieff coalition gaffe, but an obscure moment in the ancient history of Canadian politics, back when the Liberals were in power and Stephen Harper seemed open to overthrowing the Liberals with a power-sharing agreement.

The discussion surrounding Harper’s own “coalition of 2004″ is dominating the journalist gossip stream, as though something Harper considered seven years ago has any relevance to what he believes today. Actually, one would be hard-pressed to find some relevance between what Harper said in October 2008 and what he believes today.

Seven years is a lifetime in politics. What Stephen Harper, or anybody else for that matter, wanted to do in 2004 has nothing whatsoever to do with the present political situation. Why, seven years ago we had an entirely different political makeup in Ottawa. The Liberals were on the wane of a decade-long power-drunk majority that had sapped the enthusiasm of Canadians. The Conservatives were a new amalgamation of formerly fractured elements of rightwing movements and political parties. Michael Ignatieff was a professor at Harvard University.

The truth is that whatever Stephen Harper was considering in 2004 has little to do with the present-day reality of Ignatieff’s “Plan B” coalition with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois. And it might sound like so much Conservative war room propaganda, had it not been for Ignatieff’s press conference slip-up.

There are those who get angry at the maligning of the idea of cooperation, saying that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a coalition in a parliamentary democracy, and that is precisely what Harper was aiming at in 2004. But this is a distortion of the facts.

The only political parties that ever agreed in writing to a coalition involving a separatist party is the NDP and Liberals, and Michael Ignatieff’s signature exists on that document. And even ignoring the unpleasantness of aligning with a separatist party in a greedy bid for power, there’s the fact that such an alliance presented a de facto majority against the Conservatives, who had actually won the most votes of any other single party. In most coalition governments — but certainly not all — the party with the most votes aligns with another from the opposition.

The reason the Conservatives can’t do that is they are already a coalition government, though nobody seems to recognize that. The party is made up of broad elements of social and fiscal conservatives, former Reformers, Alliance Party and Progressive Conservatives. The big tent party was forced to come together in order to avoid the problem faced by the current crop of leftwing political parties all striving for a piece of the 65 per cent of Canada that doesn’t vote Conservative.

Since the country is always likely to be divided between the unified right and the majority of left-leaning voters, there are only two logical options. One is a similar amalgamation of the political left into one party that can bridge the numerous differences present in the NDP, Green, Liberal and even Bloc Quebecois voters. The other is simply the coalition, which seems the most likely given the fact the writ has been dropped yet again.

The intentions of the Conservatives in 2004 remains a bit historically ambiguous, and though I’m sure it’s a fun talking point today for some people, it remains irrelevant. There is only one coalition of any importance, and it’s the one that Ignatieff seems destined to form after the Liberals lose yet another election to a minority Conservative government.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

I dare not attempt to add to Andrew Coyne’s evisceration of Canada’s most notorious equivocator, but even I have to admit that I did not see this coming. Not only did the Liberals finally locate a spine in the House of Commons today, but they made apparent their intent to win by any means necessary this time.

I have no problem with the opposition defeating the government, as I think it sorely needs another consultation of the Canadian electorate. Nor do believe any of the rhetoric from the Conservatives that this is a reckless or irresponsible or costly thing to do. $300 million is certainly not chump change, but it’s only three times the amount the government was willing to spend on commemorating the 200th anniversary of a war the British fought.

But only days after accusing the Conservative war room of grossly misrepresenting the opposition as a coalition of democratic usurpers, Michael Ignatieff hands that same war room a gift so generous that the man may as well have planned it for the Conservatives himself.

I can already hear the narrator: “Michael Ignatieff won’t rule out a coalition with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois…” It fits the “just visiting” theme perfectly, and confirms just about every wild allegation and accusation hurled at the Liberal leader over the past two years.

The problem with Ignatieff isn’t that he refused to rule out a coalition government with the other political parties. It’s that he seems to have a problem that might be described as unique to politics. The man cannot seem to tell a lie to save his own life.

This isn’t a problem shared by Ignatieff’s ally in Toronto, Premier Dalton McGuinty. After losing an election to the Progressive Conservatives in 1999, the Liberal leader decided he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He proceeded to make every promise, every guarantee, every wishful thought that emanated from the mushy middle in order to coalesce support around an unaffordable platform.

Then, as soon as the man was elected, he broke dozens of promises, including the big one, by raising taxes. McGuinty has become a master of damage control, able to tell people what they want to hear now, and then do whatever he wants later on. And when the political damage becomes too great, McGuinty merely grants a few more unaffordable items on the taxpayer wish list, and all the lying and deceit is forgotten.

Similarly, Ignatieff should have denied any possibility of a coalition with the other opposition parties. He should have stood there and made grand statements about the Liberals and their intent to rule the next government alone. Not equivocate about red and blue doors and then flee when cross-examined by the media.

If he wins the election, he doesn’t have to worry about the support of a coalition except in passing legislation. If he loses the election he can spring the coalition into action, citing the imperative of being flexible to the shifting political dynamics of the country. Or something. I don’t know, I’m sure they have writers for this sort of thing.

The fact is that just because you say something now doesn’t mean you have to follow through with it later on. Stephen Harper has been equal to McGuinty in this regard, such as promising not to run deficits in October of 2008 and then changing his mind three weeks later. Nobody holds that against him anymore, despite the fact he broke his word, and it was a word he stated adamantly again and again, without any apparent room for flexibility.

History is written by the winners, and Ignatieff should understand that by now. He doesn’t need to tell the Canadian public that he won’t rule out a coalition government just because it might be true. If people elected truth-tellers there wouldn’t be very many people who are currently in Ottawa that would be employed right now.

As Coyne writes, Ignatieff must have known the question was coming. That he answered the question with such ambiguity is certain to seal the fate of the Liberal Party before the election campaign has even begun. All the Conservatives have to do is put that press conference on replay for the next three months and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liberals lose even more seats this time around.

Perhaps even worse than anything else is that it reinforces the perception of Ignatieff as a “waffler”. A man who can’t make up his mind even when the brass ring of opportunity practically hits him on his formidably sized cranium. Truly this is a party that was cursed by Chretien on the way out.