Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff returns to the House of Commons after speaking to reporters in the wake of the minority Conservative government's budget motion passing with the support of the NDP and Bloc Quebecois on Sept. 18, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Two weeks after having set his party on an apparently disastrous course toward a fall election, a vote that polls suggest would have stirred voter resentment and led to another Conservative win, brutally shortening his own leadership, Michael Ignatieff is now said to have emerged as a brilliant political strategist by transferring responsibility for propping up the government to the NDP. This interpretation of events is too favourable to the Liberals, who are still lagging badly behind the Conservatives; the best they can now claim is to be losing from a position of strength.
The question of whether the Liberals' coup was more by accident or design is occupying attention among pundits. In one camp are those who feel it was a premeditated attempt all along to force the hand of Jack Layton, the NDP Leader, and thereby free the Liberals from their lot as Stephen Harper's chief parliamentary enablers. If this is true, then even members of the Liberal caucus seem to have been unaware of the machinations. On the other side are those who believe it was an accidental byproduct of insecurity at the top of the party; that Mr. Ignatieff's fear of being seen as weak - the fate of his predecessor - very nearly caused him to enter an election from a position of weakness. At this point, the truth doesn't really matter.
The ground has shifted, and for all the talk over the past two days of the Harper government having being "saved," the truth is the Tories would have had a strong a chance of winning this fall. The Conservatives have not, contrary to Liberal messaging, been forced into a "coalition" (throwing Mr. Harper's own words back at him) with the "socialists" and the "separatists" as the Liberals themselves once entertained doing. They are, as before, a minority government that requires the support of one of the opposition parties to survive. What has changed is the Liberals are no longer that party. After the manufactured crisis ended (for now) when the Conservative government survived a confidence vote on Friday morning, thanks to the support of MPs from the Bloc Québécois and NDP, Mr. Ignatieff scoffed, "Jack and Gilles have gone up the hill, and we know how that little fairy tale ends."
The Liberal Leader said he felt good voting no-confidence in the Conservative government for the first time as Leader of the Opposition. The Liberals are now free to attack the government with less regard to charges of hypocrisy, with their votes against the government for once backing up their rhetoric. That is certainly some kind of victory. But the current arrangement will not last indefinitely, and with some polls suggesting the Tories near majority territory, and with the economy improving, it's not victory enough to have emerged as the winners among the losers.