View From Vancouver – Does Grit resurgence hinge on coalition?

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This article was published 06/06/2010 (5891 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sagging Liberal support once again is fuelling talk in Ottawa of a centre-left political coalition to take on the Harper Conservatives in the next election.

The idea, which gets inspiration from a politically successful union in 2003 of the Progressive Conservative and the Canadian Alliance parties, gained steam last week as the president of the Young Liberals of Canada called for debate on a proposed pairing of his party with New Democrats.

Samuel Lavoie, who sits on the Liberal party’s board, stated: "I support some kind of collaboration or co-operation among Canada’s progressives, excluding the Bloc.

"At the end of the day," he said, "I am firmly convinced that the current political landscape makes it all but impossible for a progressive party to severely diminish Harper’s ability to do whatever he wants in Ottawa …."

An Angus Reid poll, released last week, shows a merged party uniting the NDPers and Grits conceivably could defeat the Harper Conservatives — with the right leader.

The poll revealed that Conservatives would continue to win against a coalition led by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, but would find itself tied with one headed by Liberal MP Bob Rae.

If NDP Leader Jack Layton fronted the venture, the coalition would garner 43 per cent support against 37 per cent for the Conservatives.

A partisan pairing was endorsed recently by former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien, who said of the project: "If it’s doable, let’s do it."

For all that, this idea isn’t likely to get off the ground.

Ignatieff, despite consistently poor approval ratings, shows no inclination to be unseated as leader.

He’s only a year and a half into the job and there’s no obvious, more popular, replacement for him within the Grit caucus.

Moreover, Liberals — with a strong governing legacy to protect — would never accept an NDPer as head of a coalition involving their party.

This is quite apart from the fact that voters generally don’t like such prepackaged political arrangements.

Certainly the last proposed governing coalition, in 2008, involving Layton and Stéphane Dion who was slated to be its leader, and supported by the Bloc, went over like a lead balloon, especially among Westerners.

Voters prefer to decide for themselves what their parliament should look like rather than having pairings foisted on them by way of self-interested backroom deals.

Conservatives know this, and last month sent their supporters a fundraising missive, warning: "The Liberals are once again talking about forming a coalition. It’s the best reason I can think of for us to redouble our efforts now so that we’re in a position to win a majority when the next federal election is called."

All the coalition chatter would be easy to dismiss were it not for the troubling message it sends about the Liberals.

The Ignatieff-led party isn’t gaining any traction with voters, even after four years of Conservative government led by an uncharismatic leader, a recession and a return to fiscal deficit.

Liberals, in a June 1 Angus Reid poll, scored 27 per cent support to the Conservatives’ 35 per cent.

In other words, Grits have made no headway since the 2008 election, when they won just 26.2 per cent of the popular vote.

But a coalition is not the answer to the Liberals’ problems.

Unlike the Tories and Alliance parties, which shared the same roots, Liberals have never walked in lockstep philosophically with New Democrats.

There’s every reason to believe an opportunistic joint venture would be too fractious to survive.

Liberals have been sufficiently strong to form government in the past and they’ll be sufficiently strong to do it again.

What they need to do is fairly straightforward.

They must give Canadians good reasons to support them over the Harper Conservatives.

Since the party lost power in early 2006, they’ve done a rotten job in this regard.

Which suggests they don’t deserve to form government, with or without a manipulative boost from the NDP.

 

» Barbara Yaffe is a national affairs columnist for the Vancouver Sun.