Warren Kinsella, Liberal strategist, and friends, December 18, 2007. Mr. Kinsella is in the back row, between the young lady in the purple jacket, and the young lady in the black sweater. Photo: olipinterns.

So the sudden rumour Warren Kinsella apparently started yesterday  – that “serious people are involved in discussions at a serious level” about a Liberal-NDP merger – has now been officially squelched by both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and New Democrat leader Jack Layton.  We are, it would seem, back to Ignatieff’s “coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition” musings of this past weekend, in the grand old tradition of the Incredible Canadian, Mackenzie King.

For some time horizon beyond the next federal election, however, it seems possible to argue that a few more yards have been gained over the past few weeks, for some version of a unite-the-left scenario in Canada (which almost certainly still is a “centre-left” rather than a “centre-right” country – even in the Prairie West?). As Michael Ignatieff himself mused recently, democratic political parties do not finally belong to their leaders. They belong to their supporters, and especially the people who work for them.

It may still be quite clear that neither the Liberal nor NDP party establishments are ready to think of coming together before the next election, in any serious degree at all. But it is also seems to have become clear enough that others in both parties, closer to the grass roots (in some cases at least?), have started to talk seriously about some kind of future collaboration. And it seems likely enough that this talk will quietly continue – unless the Liberals actually do win a majority government in the next election, or the New Democrats actually do supplant the Liberals as the progressive party with the most seats in Parliament.  (Neither of which seems at all likely at the moment?)

Meanwhile, I feel driven to lodge one of no doubt many as-yet too quiet protests about a related piece of more short-term Conservative Party of Canada political spin. My exemplary text is an opinion piece in today’s National Post entitled “You can’t win by losing,” by Lorne Gunter  –  a “native of Medicine Hat, Alberta …  senior columnist at the Edmonton Journal … regular contributor of commentaries for both CBC Radio and Global Television … and the incoming president of Civitas – a society for conservative and libertarian academics, think-tankers, lobbyists and journalists.”

The offending political spin here is the notion that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have somehow “won” the last two federal elections in Canada – and that winners of this sort cannot be supplanted by a “coalition of losers.” The plain truth is that no single political party and no party leader has won the last three Canadian federal elections. That is part of our current political problem in Canada. You only “win” an election in a parliamentary democracy of the sort we have when your party gets a majority of seats in Parliament. You can, as both Paul Martin and Stephen Harper have recently shown, become prime minister without winning an election – if you have the largest number of seats. But you can only remain prime minister if you can somehow manage to retain the support of a majority in Parliament.

In fact, Lorne Gunter’s spelling out of the details of all this in his column today actually comes close to being reasonable. (See, eg, his scenario that begins “If the Tories won the greatest number of seats next time …”) But he definitively blots his copy book when he says “it is simply untrue that you can win government under this country’s Parliamentary conventions by losing an election.” Again, the simple truth is that no one leader or political party “won” or “lost” in any of the past three federal elections. And it has been Mr. Harper’s failure to act on this simple truth that has proved disturbing to many people of goodwill in all regions of the country. You cannot act as if you have won an election when you have not won a majority of seats in Parliament. That is the traditional rule of our system that Mr. Harper has treated with such contempt.

I have a final bone to pick with Lorne Gunter’s opinion piece today that I cannot resist alluding to quickly. He concludes his remarks with: “There is also one practical consideration the backers of a so-called “progressive coalition” overlook – the way it would almost certainly reopen regional wounds, particularly in the West.”

Lorne Gunter and friends, at a party at Conrad Black’s house in Toronto, March 20, 2006. Mr. Gunter is the man in, on this occasion at least, the dead centre. Photo: Ezra Levant.

To start with, Mr.-Gunter-from-Medicine-Hat’s view of “the West” here apparently does not include the Greater Vancouver region, and perhaps any other part of Canada west of the Lake of the Woods that could be smeared as “urbanite.” Beyond this, as a long-time Eastern supporter of Senate reform, and sympathizer towards Western Canadian national ambitions, the past four and a half years of Harperite minority government in Ottawa have started to make me wonder quite seriously about the underlying integrity of Mr. Gunter’s kind of regionalist crocodile tears. The plain truth here is that well over 60% of all Canadians voted against Mr. Harper’s Conservatives in both 2006 and 2008.  Alberta was the only province in which the Conservatives won a majority of the popular vote in 2006, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were the only provinces that so distinguished themselves in 2008. As of January 1, 2010, Alberta and Saskatchewan together account for just under 14% of the cross-Canada population. It is more and more beginning to seem to me that the kind of Western regionalism Mr. Gunter espouses is happy enough to see the tail wagging the dog in Canada, so long as the tail is Alberta.