Merger Madness

In which the dreaded 'C'-word arises (and not in reference to Christie Blatchford).

Thanks to some loose lips on the part of both the New Democrats and the Liberals, Hill-watchers from across the country are filling newspaper pages with discussion of a merger between the two opposition parties. Sun Media's resident sane person, David Akin, cautions anyone (namely, Liberals Denis Coderre and Justin Trudeau and the NDP's Pat Martin) who might think such a merger would be a “shortcut to power” that getting to 24 Sussex requires a lot more dedication, hard work, and patience than simple rebranding. “Stephen Harper also did the hard slogging to patiently lead a movement to unite conservatives in the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties who had hit their respective electoral ceilings and floors,” says Akin. Even then, it took another eight years for him to land a majority government. So why would the NDP, which similarly started small (and then grew to record heights under the guidance of Jack Layton) want to shack up with, by most recent accounts, a losing brand?

Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star answers that with two monosyllabic words: Bob Rae. With Layton's unfortunate passing, there's suddenly a gulf in leadership in the NDP, and Rae is, well, kind of like a major leaguer slumming it in Triple A baseball. Walkom figures Rae is a dead ringer for Layton when it comes to his rhetorical abilities, tendency toward pragmatism, and history of progressive politics. But there's also that little foible from 2000 when Rae very publicly split with the NDP , notes Walkom, “so it would not be easy — even for a gifted orator like Rae — to convince his old comrades to welcome him back.” We're going to take the radical position and state that there is no chance that the NDP would conscript Rae for the next electoral charge, but Walkom figures “that doesn’t mean he won’t try to replace Layton as the de facto head of Canada’s non-Conservative forces.” Which leads us to think that if the leading voice on the left is an interim leader for a third-place party whose term is up in two years, then perhaps Layton's death leaves a bigger hole than we realized.

Unless, of course, the parties' braintrusts follow the National Post's Chris Selley's advice and come to their senses by bringing up the scariest word of 2011: coalition. With the Bloc Québécois effectively dead, the sovereigntist threat that Harper played up so shrewdly during the last election is removed from the coalition equation. “Now that [Quebecers have] thrown their votes to a federalist party, there’s very little standing in the way of such an arrangement except a little bit of leadership — legitimate coalitions cannot come from elections in which they’ve been explicitly disavowed,” says Selley. He also points out that “pollsters never found opinions about coalition governance to match the vitriol,” so there's already lukewarm support for the idea across the progressive spectrum. All that's stopping the New Democrats and Liberals from considering the coalition question is pride and fear of a repeat of Harper's Smear Machine 2011. Find a way around those, and suddenly 24 Sussex doesn't seem so far away.