A week is a long time in politics

Minority Parliament reconfigured
From Monday's Globe and Mail


What a difference a few months can make. It was only in December that the federal Liberals were plunged into a leadership crisis induced partly by a strategic alliance with the Bloc Québécois and the NDP. This weekend, at their convention in Vancouver, the Liberals celebrated their new-found stability – and a not coincidental lead in the polls – under Michael Ignatieff. It is now the Conservatives who might be considering strategic alliances with those other opposition parties, and whose members are beginning to ask some leadership questions of their own.

Such is the nature, to some extent, of a minority parliament. It cannot function for any sustained period unless the parties show some flexibility in their dealings with one another, and there would be no inherent shame for the Conservatives to co-operate with the NDP, or perhaps even the Bloc, to keep their government alive. On matters such as Employment Insurance reform (see the editorial below), addressing opposition concerns may serve an economic and social good.

That the Conservatives would enter any such negotiations from a position of weakness, however, and that they might weaken themselves further in the process, can be traced almost entirely to the political miscalculations of Stephen Harper.

Had the Prime Minister not ignited a parliamentary meltdown with his government's hyper-partisan economic update last November, the Liberals would not have accelerated the leadership process that replaced Stéphane Dion with Mr. Ignatieff. This weekend's convention would have been the culmination of a divisive leadership campaign, and the work of the new leader to rebuild the party would only just be beginning.

Instead, the Liberals are in vastly better shape than they were at the end of last year – united behind Mr. Ignatieff, no longer in debt, and showing signs of conducting the party renewal they neglected for so long. While no serious judgment of Mr. Ignatieff's leadership can be made until he releases a detailed policy agenda, the possibility that the Liberals could so soon present a serious challenge would have been hard to imagine back in November.