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If a Liberal-New Democratic coalition can survive four months of Stéphane Dion and then acquire a credible leader, it might well be successful and pave the way for a new centre-left party to oppose the centre-right Conservatives. Parliament works best with two parties, so ending the era of multiparty Parliaments would be a blessing.

Contrary to the charge that a coalition government would be unstable during a time of crisis when stability is important, a Liberal-NDP government with the guaranteed support of the Bloc Québécois would, in effect, be a majority government for at least 18 months. If Stephen Harper's government somehow retains power, it will still be a minority - only now under a blundering and widely disliked leader who's made enemies of the parties to which he must look for support.

But could a Liberal-NDP coalition function as a team? Under a respected leader, it could. Despite the notion that the Liberals and the NDP are ideological opposites, they are, in reality, similar. The NDP long ago ceased to be socialist - in fact, it disowned the ideology from its birth, claiming to be social democratic, instead. That is to say, the NDP accepts a market-based economy regulated by government. So do most Liberals. The differences between the parties are of degree, not principle.

No doubt there would be fierce debates in a coalition cabinet, perhaps even resignations and talk of mutiny. But, again, the reality is that neither party could afford to let the government fail. Of course, it might fail anyway to cope with a long and deep recession, but so probably would any other government, including Mr. Harper's. Governments in all the developed democracies in the Great Depression's early years eventually failed and were replaced - including, of course, the Conservative one in Ottawa. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt took office during the economic collapse, for which he could not be blamed. Instead, he was given credit for his imaginative, but not always successful, efforts to solve the problem.

Assuming the Liberal-NDP coalition has two or three years in office, what would follow? Could the two parties reasonably go into an election as opponents when both bore equal responsibility for the government's record? Perhaps offering different futures but co-operating in a new party might be NDP Leader Jack Layton's only route to 24 Sussex Dr. That was possibly in his mind when he began to talk some time ago with the Bloc, as he has told us, about supporting a possible Liberal-NDP coalition. It would explain why he has joined forces with the bankrupt, leaderless and disorganized Liberals instead of fighting in another election to replace them.

Anthony Westell is a retired political journalist.