The Liberals devastated, although nowhere near as bad as the Progressive Conservatives were in 1993. The Bloc almost wiped out. A single Green, finally and deservedly, elected. And the Conservatives and NDP on top for the next 4-5 years.

What will a Harper majority bring? Will the worst fears of the ABC’s (Anything but Conservatives) be realised? Certainly Mr. Harper now has free rein to spend billions on prisons and fighter jets.

I suspect that public funding for political parties will be chopped, and soon. The NDP stand to get a great deal more in public funding than they ever have – triple the amount they received last election – and with that kind of money they can challenge the Conservatives in a serious way. By cutting public funding, the Conservatives can hobble all their opponents seriously.

That said, cutting public funding risks a backlash; there could be an outpouring of support for the other parties, especially the NDP. Mr. Harper will make this worse if he does something like privatize CBC.

But this is minor. Mr Harper has been dreaming of a majority for a long time, and  you can bet he has some plans to make use of his new power. At the same time, he is somewhat constrained by claims of being fiscally conservative. He has promised to balance the budget within a few years, and at the same time he loves to slash taxes/government revenue. All of that combined with a sluggish economy is not going to provide a lot of money for shiny toys.

Of course, that might mean that Mr. Harper focuses on the social engineering parts of his agenda, as at least initially they cost less. By this I mean he may well order a crackdown on pot, may implement ‘mandatory minimum’ sentences for more crimes, and will likely cut budgets for things he believes should be privatized (education, aspects of health care, for example) or that speak inconvenient truths (all government science departments, for example). U.S-style copyright enforcement is coming. There will be lots of corporate-friendly deals, from ‘free’ trade to special subsidies and tax breaks.

Will Mr. Harper push further? Probably, but how? He will be constrained by budget, and the provinces are expecting to negotiate a new deal on health care. He has already committed billions for fighter jets and prisons, though was sketchy on where the money would come from.

Quebec

Quebec is now a more complicated situation, if that is possible. Quebecers went NDP in a  big way, and the impression around the net community is that many are disappointed that the rest of Canada did not do the same. That is, Quebecers did their part as Canadians to bring in a progressive government, and the rest of us did not hold up our end. Some are pointing to this as evidence that Quebecers do indeed see the world in a different way.

I think there is some truth to this; Quebecers showed courage voting for change the way they did. It reminds me of a key difference between the respective hockey teams: When the Canadiens have a poor team, the fans stay home and management gets the message. When the Leafs have a bad team, the fans still fill the stadiums and buy the merchandise, and so management produces the worst team the fans will accept. Quebecers take action when the situation is not acceptable; the rest of us need to learn that lesson from them.

I think a resurgence of separatism is quite possible, and will be reflected in the next provincial election. The federal NDP would be wise to fight tooth-and-nail to advance Quebec’s progressive agenda; the rest of Canada would benefit, too.

Ontario

Ontario, or really the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is who shafted Quebec by sending many new Conservative MPs to Ottawa. However – did they really? If you look at the individual riding results, in many cases the Conservatives benefited from vote splitting. Next time, Toronto, get it together and agree on who you’re going with.

There is an Ontario provincial election in October. Historically, Ontario has elected the party opposite to the one in power in Ottawa; given what just happened in Ottawa, the Ontario Liberals would be favoured to win this fall. However, the Liberals have been in power since 2003, numerous suspicious deeds have come to light, and Ontarians may well feel a desire to change them.

But to whom? The Ontario Conservatives are not particularly liked and of course Ontarians just sent plenty of Conservatives to Ottawa. It could be time for Ontario to give the NDP and Greens a shot again.

BC

BC also has an election…sometime. Premier Christy Clark has no seat in the Legislature, as she won the Liberal leadership after Gordon Campbell resigned. She could call an election at any time, as it looks bad if the Premier is unelected. She could also run in a by-election, assuming a safe seat can be found. Currently, the only open seat is not a sure thing, and it would look really bad if the Premier continued to govern after failing to win a seat.

A provincial election is no sure thing for the BC Liberals, either. They’ve been in power awhile and are starting to smell, now there’s a Conservative federal government, so BC voters might just decide to put the NDP and some Greens in charge for a bit. (If public sentiment tips this way, I think there is a real chance that some Greens would be elected.)

Overall

It seems likely to me that the harder Mr. Harper pushes his social engineering agenda, the more likely he is to face unfriendly governments in various provinces (Saskatchewan, which has had a budget-balancing NDP government recently, has an election this year, too). Not that he won’t do some of it anyway; I’m just pointing out the likely backlash.

He is safe cutting taxes and spending money, but squaring this with his alleged fiscal conservatism will be difficult. He will have to at least appear to be on track to balancing the budget or he’ll lose his ‘steady hand on the economy’ reputation.

There are also new expectations that come with majority; for example, Mr. Harper no longer has an excuse for not attempting to reform the Senate, or scrapping the gun registry, or implementing some of the other measures blocked by the Opposition under the previous minority.

Mr. Layton and the NDP have 4-5 years to broaden their base, and they should not waste a minute. There is a very good chance that Canadians will be looking for a change after a long majority Harper government, and the NDP want to be that change. They also want to get building while they’re still getting the per-vote subsidy, which Mr. Harper committed to ending if he gained a majority.

The NDP could do a better job of presenting their values and vision, and then reinforcing these through their platform. Much of what the NDP wants to do is along the German/Nordic model and would be quite popular with many more Canadians than normally vote NDP. Mr. Layton and his new, expanded team need to focus on getting their vision and values to Canadians over the next several years so that next election, the choice is clear.

The Liberals are not out, but they may be reduced for the foreseeable future to something like their current size; it depends how well the NDP do at communicating their vision and values. If the NDP do well, the Liberals are in big trouble and should get used to being on the outside for awhile. Which is not necessarily bad; the Liberals need to decide what they stand for and then stand for it.

The Greens finally have an elected MP, and it’s their leader, Elizabeth May. She will be a strong voice, and her election embarrasses those who kept her out of the leader’s debates. Will she be a breakthrough winner that opens the door to many other Green seats? If the NDP does well, then no.

The next election is the NDP’s to lose. I think Mr. Harper cannot help but push too far, as he has done repeatedly in the past, and enough Canadians will have had enough of him that a credible alternative will win. The NDP must use this time to show how they are that credible alternative.

OBL has been reported dead. This leads me to three possibilities:

1. He really is recently deceased, meaning prior rumours were wrong. If so, points 2 and 3 hold for the US/World generally and Canada specifically.
2. US: There goes a big part of the justification for being in Afghanistan. Americans are sick of being at war, no matter what Bill O’Reilly and the CEO of Halliburton want to think. This is the perfect opportuinty for Mr. Obama to say Afghanistan should become a UN peacekeeping mission – of which the US is not a part - or simply to annouce a timetable for withdrawal. Either way, everyone is relieved. If the Afghanis really do not want to be dominated by the Taliban, then they need to prepare to stand up and destroy them. As the uprisings in the Middle East have shown, only if the people unite against an oppressor can they have a chance to be free.
3. Canada – There goes a large part of Stephen Harper’s fear-based agenda. Not that the whole thing was based on fear of OBL and Al-Queada by a long shot, but OBL was the foundation upon which the War on Terror was built. Canadians are sick of this war and would like to go back to peacekeeping. The only fella tha’s likely to do that is Jack Layton. The official death of OBL can only hurt Harper and boost the NDP. The timing could not be worse for Harper.
4. The fourth possibility is this: It is possible that previous reports of Mr. Bin Laden’s death were correct, and it is just now being officially reported by the United States. If so, points 2 and 3 still stand. The only danger is that Americans somehow discover that Mr. OBL had been dead for some time and their government knew it.

UPDATE: While I have no reason to doubt the official U.S. version, it is awfully convenient that bin Laden was buried at sea.

For the vast majority of pop drinkers, if the restaurant doesn’t have Coke, Pepsi will do just fine. And to many Canadians, the difference between the Liberals and Conservatives is like that between Coke and Pepsi: not worth worrying about.

I believe this explains a big part of the ‘NDP surge’ that has pushed the NDP well past the Liberals in the polls. Canadians can see that Ignatieff’s Liberals are not much different than the Conservatives, as much as they try to make out like they are worlds apart. Both Ignatieff and Harper would have put our troops in Iraq, both love the tar sands, neither has any sort of plan to meet environmental commitments like CO2 reduction or to ‘green’ our economy the way prosperous economies like Germany, Norway, Denmark, and even China and Brazil are doing.

In short, both Ignatieff and Harper will continue to follow the United States, even as the U.S. economy continues to stagnate and American moral authority continues its decline.

The Liberals are well known for ‘campaigning from the left and governing from the right,’ and I think Canadians just decided it was time to vote for the real thing. Too many broken promises by the Liberals over the years have eroded trust in their ‘brand.’

Coke and Pepsi spend billions on marketing to get you to buy their products, but ultimately there’s not much difference. Looks like Canadians have decided it’s time for a switch.

With all due respect to Jean Chretien, he is a big part of the reason that many Canadians no longer trust the Liberal Party. It wasn’t just Adscam, during which Mr. Chretien was the:

Prime Minister of Canada at the time the Sponsorship Program was established and operated. The Gomery Commission, First Phase Report which assigned blame for the Sponsorship scandal cast most of the indemnity for misspent public funds, fraud on Chrétien and his Prime Minister’s Office staff, though it cleared Chrétien himself of direct wrongdoing.

That was bad enough. But for many of us, there is a long history of big talk and little action. To give three prime examples:

1. The Liberals campaigned against NAFTA – but then embraced it once elected
2. The Liberals campaigned against the GST – but then embraced it once elected
3. The Liberals signed Kyoto – but then did less than nothing to meet that commitment

Tell me again why we should trust Liberal promises?

For me, the Kyoto betrayal offers a particularly compelling reason to not vote for the Liberals. Had Mr. Chretien’s government redirected oil and tar mining subsidies to green energy – say solar thermal, wind, and geothermal – then today there would be thousands of clean and green jobs in these fields in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The prairies would be an ‘energy superpower,’ but in clean energy and high-tech jobs, the way Denmark and Germany are today.

Subsidies to tar mining amounted to approximately $1.5 billion taxpayer dollars per year in 2010. Multiply that by the number of years since Kyoto was signed in 1998 and you get a heck of a lot of money: $19.5B in today’s dollars. That’s also a lot of jobs:

• Siemens plans to build a CDN$ 120M wind turbine factory in the UK, anticipated to create ~2,200 jobs
• GE plans to build a CDN$ 160M wind turbine factory in the UK, anticipated to create more than 2,000 jobs
• The Pembina Institute estimates that “for every million dollars invested, an average 36.3 jobs are created in the energy efficiency sector, 12.2 jobs in the renewable energy sector, and only 7.3 jobs in the development of conventional energy.”

That was an opportunity squandered and an international commitment broken. Using the Pembina Institute’s figures, Jean Chretien’s Liberals could have put us on the path to creating 237,900 jobs in the prairies just from the subsidies alone.

The Liberals campaign from the left and govern from the right, and it looks like Canadians have finally had enough and are going to elect the real deal.

I know that Dr. Keith Martin, a good man, has won this riding repeatedly in the past – but he stepped down and a new Liberal candidate is in place.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Martin just before the last election in which we were opposing candidates, him the incumbent Liberal and me just trying to represent common sense as a candidate for the Green Party of Canada. Dr. Martin saw the writing on the wall; as more people moved into the suburbs of Langford, the riding grew more Conservative. In recent elections, the Conservative share of the vote had been steadily increasing, and indeed in the 2008 election, Dr. Martin won by only 68 votes.

I was accused of nearly handing the riding to the Conservatives in that election, as I garnered 8.2% of the vote, an increase of about 1,500 from the previous election and nearly enough to sink Dr. Martin. (Assuming, of course, that I was taking all my votes from him, and not from any Conservative/NDP/independent candidates. And rather unfairly ignoring the droves of former Liberal voters who stayed home.)

This time around and Mr. Ignatieff is no more popular than Mr. Dion was – less, even. Honestly, I don’t understand why. He seems like a sharp cookie, decent guy, a little arrogant but then they all seem that way; I think that Canadians are just done with the Liberals, at least for now. They’ve become too much like the Conservatives, so one of them has become irrelevant.

Given all this, Liberal turnout in EJdF is likely to be low again, to say the least, and that could easily allow the Conservative candidate to win.

However, Randall Garrison is back for the NDP, by all reports a strong candidate. Can’t say I’ve met him, but people I respect and who have worked with and/or campaigned against Mr. Garrison say he’s a good guy. In the 2006 election, he came in second place, not far behind Dr. Martin.

There is a real chance that this riding could change hands this election – the question is to whom. Liberal and Green voters are the deciding factor in this riding:

• If they vote Liberal or Green, very likely the Conservative will win
• If some switch votes to NDP, very likely the NDP will win

In the past, I have been totally opposed to strategic voting, but I’ve since realized that a) we must work within the political system we have, even while trying to change it, and b) there are better ways to support a party than simply voting.

Real Liberal supporters in EJdF should pair their votes; at least you would be helping elect a Liberal in another riding, given that this one is a lost cause.

I do think it is time to give the NDP a chance. The other major parties need to rethink their strategy, change leaders, and come up with a compelling vision. I wouldn’t say Jack Layton and the NDP have such a vision either, or if they have they haven’t communicated it very well, but at least the NDP is more likely to take some important steps in cleaning up Ottawa and in shifting us more toward the German/Nordic economic and social way of doing things, and less American.

If you’re a Liberal in Esquimalt Juan de Fuca, pair your vote so you see a Liberal elected somewhere, and vote NDP at home. The alternative is to see Esquimalt Juan de Fuca go Conservative, possibly at a time when the NDP will become the governing party.

Do you realize your power? Stephen Harper and his Conservatives do. That’s why they squashed on-campus polling stations. This young woman gets it:

“Youth can almost change the political landscape,” said Cooke, who’s excited to vote in her first election. “They have such different views than the people who do vote, it would be completely changed and more representative of the population.”

It would not take much to change the politics in this country, and you can do it.

15,000 swapped votes can change which party becomes government

Rick Mercer gets it. (He’s between a ‘young person’ and an ‘old fart,’ but not yet middle-aged, so not sure who he is. He’s hip but not a hipster.) But he completely understands how important it is for young folks to vote, both for the country and for themselves. His now-famous rant inspired vote mobs across Canada.

This is your election; you get to decide the direction this country takes. I hope you have seen that Stephen Harper’s anti-science, anti-environment, pro-US leaning policies are not what’s best for Canada – and I hope you get out there and tell him so with your vote.

Personally, I think it is time to give the NDP a shot. They’ll move us toward a more European society and economy, and look at how well Germany, Norway, Denmark, and other countries are doing compared to us in many ways.

But the choice is yours. This old fart humbly suggests you give the NDP a look – but regardless of your choice, take a hand in your future. Don’t let your parents pick your government.

Regular readers will know that I ran for the Green Party of Canada in the last election, and you will also know that, despite that, I am independent. (The best description I’ve come up with for myself is a Green Independent Conservative: GIC.) I am not running in the current election.

So, like millions of other independently-minded Canadians, I must decide whom to trust with my vote. (I don’t think that rejecting my ballot is a mature or useful thing to do in this election; there is enough differentiation among the parties and platforms, and they’re not all so hopelessly corrupt that I would take this last resort.)

Who then? If you’ve been reading me, you’ll know I’m leaning strongly toward the NDP, not because I’m a raving socialist – and neither is the NDP – but because they seem most likely to move Canada in a more German/Nordic direction, and we need that. Some claim that we must slavishly follow the United States, but I reject this. Look at Norway as an example of a successful economy and society (you need both); it is right next to the Russian bear, but Norway is no Russian stooge. They have a strong and stable economy, and they have very successfully embraced the new green economy.

Germany has also done exceptionally well, and consider that the reunification imposed enormous costs on the country; essentially, everything built by the Soviet regime was crap in comparison to what had been accomplished under social democracy in the free half of Germany, and had to be scrapped and rebuilt.

I watched Peter Mansbridge interview Jack Layton, leader of the NDP, and Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservatives, and I have to say that Layton came out as the more mature, wiser leader. Harper came across as such a…politician. He had a couple of decent points, but on the whole was one slippery character. It didn’t seem to matter the question; Harper’s response was either “OMG! Coalition!” or “I must have a majority.” Every time Mansbridge would pursue a non-answer or a contradiction, well, it was like trying to catch a greased pig.

Layton, on the other hand, seemed like a reasonable guy, willing to – expecting to – work with others to govern the country. Harper comes across as a petulant boy, wanting it all his way or not at all.

But the economy!

Harper constantly fearmongers that anyone else will wreck the economy, but is that really true? He was pushed into a ‘stimulus’ after the recession hit by the other parties, which he then directed a disproportionate share to Conservative-held ridings; that’s porkbarrel politics, plain-and-simple, and it ain’t conservative.

But even worse, the Conservative stimulus was misdirected in a more fundamental way. The Harper Government™ absolutely refused to direct the stimulus in a way that moved the Canadian economy forward. It paid for people to repave their driveway or build a new deck, but is that really a productive use of taxpayer money? If you’re going to dole out the largesse, shouldn’t it at least be productive?

And here’s an important reason why I favour Layton: Had Layton and the NDP been running the government, they would also have done the stimulus, but without being forced by the other parties and with more sensible direction. The NDP would have looked at things like rebuilding our rail system, or perhaps invested in electric cars, or in wind and solar energy, or helped people insulate their houses so they would need less energy, thus saving money permanently.

Harper’s stimulus was not as wasteful as the Bush/Obama U.S. version, where people paid down credit cards or bought big screen TVs made in China, but really most of what it did was create temporary construction jobs. Layton’s NDP would also have spent money, but on things that move Canada toward the economy that is rapidly developing in Europe and China, and that we are equally rapidly falling behind.

On the whole, I’d rather taxpayer dollars be spent, if they must be, on productive, forward-looking projects, not simply make-work-vote-buying gimmicks.

Is the NDP perfect? Is any party? In politics you must choose among what is available, and I believe it is time to give the NDP a chance.

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By the way, why not the Liberals? Let me sum it up like this: Jean Chretien signed the Kyoto Accord – then did utterly and absolutely nothing to make it real. Imagine if Chretien had redirected tar mining subsidies to wind and solar manufacturing and generation – as Germany and Norway and many other countries are doing? That would have created many thousands of secure, well-paying, clean manufacturing jobs in the Prairies. Chretien did not, and Ignatieff will not, either. Status quo, yo.

And why not the Greens? Simple pragmatism; they are not going to get elected (with the possible exception of Elizabeth May). It is not only our first-past-the-post system to blame, either; the reality is that other parties have arisen and captures seats under this system.

I just received an update from the polling company, and the news is so big that it needs to be said again: 56% of Canadians find a Liberal-NDP coalition completely or somewhat acceptable, or are ambivalent.

As you can see for yourself in the chart below, if you add up those who are not opposed to a Liberal-NDP coalition, that amounts to 79% of all those who are willing to accept a coalition.

Acceptable Coalitions

No wonder Harper spends so much effort demonizing the idea of a coalition; many more Canadians want a coalition than want a Conservative government.

UPDATE 1: Many thanks to Redditor Hikury who found a major mistake I made; the results shown here only apply to “those who do not find any coalition scenario completely unacceptable (72% of total).” That means I must multiply 72% by 0.79 to get the number of people who find a Liberal-NDP coalition acceptable, and this number is 56.88%.

This is still huge, given that approximately 35% of the population is likely to vote Conservative.

[And if you're afraid of a Liberal-NDP coalition, perhaps you should check this out: One such government gave us much of what we think of as essentially Canadian today.]

UPDATE 2: Some folks have pointed  out that I didn’t provide a source for this data. That’s partly an oversight and partly because it’s an ‘exclusive.’ First, the original survey was cited in this recent post: Survey: Coalition Government Acceptable to Most Canadians, which also provides a link to the survey company’s site and data. Second, this particular data was omitted from their original report; I emailed the company to ask about it, and they were kind enough to send me the entire report, from which I copied-and-pasted the chart you see here. Still, I should have provided a link to the original data that is online. My apologies.

TNS Canadian Facts has  released some fascinating results from a new survey asking Canadians what they really think about the idea of a coalition government, and the results are not going to make Stephen Harper very happy. The survey clearly says that most Canadians accept a coalition government, and many of us would accept one where two minority parties form the government.

The survey results are shown here in easy-to-read graphical form. Here are some of the – to me – very interesting results:

• 48% of Canadians would find a coalition of minority parties acceptable
• In addition, another 18% answered that they didn’t know or “It depends”
• It seems to me that, if a coalition formed and did even a halfway respectable job of governing, most of this 18% would find the coalition acceptable

The surveyors asked two similar but critically different questions about coalition scenarios, but neglected to post the responses to the most interesting. The questions to which I am referring are (rephrased here for brevity and clarity):

• Which coalition scenario do you prefer?
• Which coalition scenario is acceptable?

The first question is certainly interesting (Liberal-NDP was the first choice at 29%), but to me the second is the most useful and interesting. As the Rolling Stones famously sang,

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

I think most of us accept this in politics, and many of us think a coalition could be just what Canada needs right now.

I have written the company requesting the answers.

UPDATE 18 April: Answers received, and it is very revealing. Thanks to Norman Baillie-David of TNS Global.

First, the acceptable results are shown in the chart opposite. Fully 70% of Canadians find a Liberal-NDP coalition completely or somewhat acceptable, or are ambivalent. If Mr. Harper has seen this, he must be very, very worried.

Coalitions that are Acceptable to Canadians

My second questions was about survey methodology, in which they called only landlines. Mr Baillie-David’s response quoted in full:

Secondly, while you raise a valid point about cell-phone only households, and this is an emerging trend in other countries, the proportion of Canadian households currently characterized as “cell-phone only, i.e. no landline, sits currently at approximately 8% (various sources).  From many previous studies, we know that while these households differ on a number of different demographics (more likely to be  younger, male and single), their opinions do not differ from the wider population in a strong enough manner to cause a “statistically significant difference” in the overall results.  In other words, for a survey this size, using cell-phone only households wouldn’t move the overall results by more than the margin of error of 3.1%. Therefore, due to the cost and logistical difficulty of obtaining and sampling cell-phone only households, we do not yet include them in our ExpressTel omnibus surveys; however, this is continuously open to review and will likely change as the number of cell-phone only households continue to rise.

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How about you? What are your thoughts on a coalition? Take the simple poll below.

Note: I deliberately excluded coalitions including the Bloc because that option is not favoured by most in all surveys to date, and generally coalitions do not include the Bloc anyway. The Bloc simply agrees not to bring down the coalition government on a confidence vote.

Michael Ignatieff has repeatedly ruled out the idea of a coalition; this was a big mistake. He has both painted himself into a corner and hung the Liberal Party out to dry. Let’s look at the scenarios:

1. Conservative majority: Ignatieff will go, willingly or no.
2. Conservative minority: Ignatieff has said “No” to a coalition, so where does this leave him now? Many Canadians would have been willing to accept a Liberal-NDP coalition. Likely Ignatieff will quit or be pushed out.
3. Liberal minority: Looking very unlikely at this point; not even worth considering unless the poll results change drastically in the next two weeks.

Given current polls, those are the only realistic outcomes. The only one that keeps Ignatieff around is #3, and it is a remote chance at this point. Had he not ruled out a coalition, there would have been a fourth possibility:

4. Conservatives get enough seats for a minority, but Liberals and NDP form a coalition

But that’s off the table. I realize Mr. Ignatieff was trying to force people to ‘choose’ the Liberals, but that strategy has backfired. (And was pretty obnoxious to begin with. In essence, he was saying “Give me a minority or I’ll stick you with a Harper Government™ again.”)

So it seems to me that, unless Mr. Ignatieff can turn things around soon, he’ll be asking for his old job back.

That leaves the Liberals in a bad way. They’ll be leaderless, facing a Harper government that has promised to ram through some odious bills; how can the Liberals vote against those bills if they don’t have a leader? (Note: They may technically have a leader, in that either Ignatieff sticks around while they choose a new leader, or an interim leader is appointed. However, either way, the Liberals are in a very weak position with a lame-duck leader.)

If the Conservatives, even in a minority position, decide to take advantage of Liberal weakness and attempt to push through some of their particularly nasty bills, the NDP and Bloc may well vote against them. Why? Well, look at the potential outcomes for those two parties:

1. The Harper Government is defeated – but instead of an election, the NDP proposes an NDP-Liberal coalition, with the Bloc promising not to defeat them on confidence motions. If the Liberals say “No” to this, then:
2. There is another snap election and the Liberals have no leader. Worse, they rejected a coalition, which many Canadians would prefer to another election.

Frankly, I don’t see a winning strategy here for the Liberals. Perhaps Ignatieff will go back on his word and form a coalition anyway, but he and the Liberals will take a hit for that. The Liberals already have enough credibility issues, especially in the West, without such a blatant and self-serving flip-flop. (The Conservatives do similar things, but so far nothing is sticking to them.)

The only hope I see for Ignatieff and the Liberals is this (assuming Ignatieff wants to stick around): In the event of another Conservative minority, Ignatieff will go back on his word and form a Liberal-NDP coalition. Yes, they’ll get roasted by the Conservatives, the press, and many Canadians. However, if the coalition can hold together for, say two years, and can also do some good things, then Iggy will be forgiven and should do much better in the next election.

If this does not happen, the NDP could pass the Liberals in the polls as they come to be seen as the only viable alternative to the Conservatives.