Question to Liberals wanting to avoid an election...

"Some top Liberals have urged Dion to cut the incessant sabre rattling and frankly admit the party is in no position to fight an election this spring." - CTV.ca

So the reason that the Liberals are allegedly in no position to fight an election - and I do not, by the way, necessarily disagree with this allegation - is that Stéphane Dion is not a leader. How is this problem going to be solved or even mitigated by an admission by Dion that the official opposition is in no position to fight an election and is therefore prepared to allow the minority government to do whatever it wants?

Stephen Harper these resembles no Prime Minister so much as Joe Clark in that he's a minority Prime Minister who's decided to govern as if he had a majority. Like Clark, he faces a Liberal opposition that gives no appearance of being ready for an election In 1980, though, the Liberals adopted slightly different tactics.

Merger, you say?

Predictably, a lot of people who don't like the Tories - including some very intelligent people - are saying that the Liberals and NDP need to merge. Notwithstanding the fact that the parties hate each other much more than either hates the Tories, let's pretend that that happened. Further, let's pretend that every single person who voted for either of those parties voted instead for the new party, an assumption which is almost certainly ill-founded (with exhibit A being the Conservative Party of Canada, which still hasn't achieved the combined 2000 vote totals of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Parties). How would the legislature look today? Well, it would be a two party legislature, with the Tories having 62 seats and the Opposition having 21. Throw the Greens into the equation, and the Opposition also picks up Edmonton McClung and Calgary Elbow (although we're sort of reaching the point there that it might be fair to start wondering if we should add the Wildrose Alliance votes to the Tory counts, since we evidently think that political beliefs are a binary concept). None of the Opposition ridings in either scenario would be located outside the city limits of Edmonton, Calgary, or Lethbridge (even St. Albert, Liberal last time, went Tory by a margin of more than the combined NDP/Green vote this time around).

It takes a very special opposition party supporter to look at the results of this election and concludes that their biggest problem was a vote split.