Coalition back? Seat projections raise the question

Posted by padams under All

Paul Adams

The talk of a possible coalition government died last year under the weight of two enormous obstacles.

The first was that the proposed coalition was going to be led by Stéphane Dion. If Canadians thought that one thing had been decided in the 2008 election, it was that Dion was not going to be prime minister. By the time that Michael Ignatieff acceded to the Liberal leadership a few weeks after the coalition proposal, the idea had been thoroughly tarnished, and was quickly abandoned.

But that decision may have been influenced by the second great obstacle to the coalition idea: although the proposed government would have consisted of NDP and Liberal ministers only, it was crucially dependent on the Bloc Québécois to remain in office. Stephen Harper and the Conservatives made hay of the fact that the proposed coalition would be dependent on a separatist party to stay in office. That was a reasonable political concern, and possibly even a potential constitutional concern. It certainly became a public concern as well.

The Tories’ recent three-month slide in the polls and the Liberals recent bump up potentially create a new scenario, however.

Look at the seat projection below. It is based on today’s poll results released to the CBC by EKOS Research. (Conflict alert: I work for EKOS on the CBC surveys). What the seat projection suggests is that if an election were held today, the Liberals and NDP would be almost within reach of forming a majority without the votes of the Bloc Québécois. Just two seats short, in fact, at the moment, if the projection were correct.

Given the history of the coalition idea, neither opposition party is likely to resurrect it before an election. But if the results of the next election were anything like what you see below, it is hard to imagine that at least some people in each party would not be tempted to consider a coalition once again. And expect the Conservatives to raise exactly that spectre if the race stay this tight into the next election campaign — whenever that might be.