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.