'We Wouldn't Be in This Situation if Canadian Politics Wasn't so Unremittingly Stupid'

It's Day 2 of campaign and cynicism has already been declared the winner of the 2011 election.

The Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert says that already it looks like Stephen Harper has been able to frame the election conversation to his advantage. The prime minister has spent years hammering home the idea that if the Conservatives win a minority, the Liberals will form an ungodly alliance with the NDP and Bloc, and Michael Ignatieff caved Saturday by announcing he would not form a coalition under any circumstances. According to Hébert, this ignores the fact that a coalition is not only the legitimate right of an opposition leader but arguably his duty. Harper has “succeeded in framing the quest for more stable, more consensual governing arrangements within a minority House of Commons as a failing rather than as the responsible act of any serious leader of the main opposition.”

The National Post’s Chris Selley writes that Ignatieff has painted himself into a corner because, while he needed to give voters clarity on the coalition issue, the day after the election he may well discover forming one is his only route to power. The idea of a coalition wouldn’t be so toxic for the Liberals if Stéphane Dion’s attempt to form a coalition in 2008 hadn’t gone so badly, writes Selley, but “we also wouldn't be in this situation if Canadian politics wasn't so unremittingly stupid and shameless that a prime minister would go around talking of a two-year-old coalition as if it still existed and expect people to be angry and afraid rather than confused and bored.”

The Conservatives, of course, have completely ignored Ignatieff’s anti-coalition pledge, but the Post’s John Ivison correctly points out that the issue should now be considered dead because Ignatieff knows that going back on his word would “provoke a pitchfork rebellion that would likely make his party unelectable in any subsequent election.” The strange thing is that, with his chances now slimmer than ever, a state of calm appears to have washed over Ignatieff. “[T]here is an element of grace without pressure about Mr. Ignatieff,” writes Ivison. “His speeches are like political jazz.” May 2, of course, he’ll be singing the blues. Zing!