Background: After spending $300 million for an election to congeal his minority into a majority government, Stephen Harper made little progress and ended up with another minority government. This appeared to be well and good, despite the fact that a coalition of the left-wing parties plus the Bloc Quebecois could easily defeat the Conservative government in a confidence motion if it decided to do so. However, because Harper failed to deliver an economic stimulus package in his fall budget, the coalition is attempting to take over as government.

That’s the official reason, anyway. Stanley Hartt argues that the whole thing is a pretext to prevent the Conservatives from cutting per-vote campaign funding. Lysiane Gagnon, predictably, thinks this is fantastic.

Governor-General Michaelle Jean is faced with an essentially subjective decision about whether to accept the coalition’s overtures to replace the minority government.

Bloggers are amused.

This is an interesting bit of political theatre in that the left coalition is one of rejection rather than agreement. Dion disagrees with the Bloc’s reason for existence. Layton smelled blood in the water and was poised to take over for Dion at the slightest misstep. I have no doubt that the parties can cooperate, but their agenda will be difficult to characterize as anything but white bread.

This all assumes that Michaelle Jean feels it’s appropriate to allow Dion to step in as Prime Minister, of course, though it would be difficult for her to disallow it. The political costs to defeating a motion of confidence and calling another election would be ridiculously high; if Jean values continuity and stability over effective government, then it would be against the left’s interest to defeat a motion of confidence lest they go through another election just to have a similar result but provide a procedural opportunity to request to form a government.

As I discussed here, there’s a perception that the Liberal Party is suffering because Stephane Dion lacks charisma and the public perceives him as weak. Margaret Wente agrees – “At the start of this campaign, Mr. Dion decided to forget about his team and go head-to-head with Harper,” Wente says. “To hell with the Liberal brand!” Wente’s article isn’t terribly insightful – she points to Dion’s professorial manner and his poor public speaking skills, as well as the fragmented left and the charisma that the fragmentors (Elizabeth May and Jack Layton) bring to the table. She further blames him for staying on-message about the Green Shift when the voters are worrying about Wall Street, but that isn’t exactly a poor decision. Shifting gears in reaction to something that’s likely to be fairly transient in the news would simply label Dion as a panderer.

Jeffrey Simpson also criticizes the Dion campaign, discussing the Green Shift and the Liberal campaign’s attendant “‘funds’ [and] ‘studies’”. He points to the continuing cuts as something that the Canadian people just won’t stand for:

“If the Liberals ever got a chance to implement this platform – a highly unlikely prospect – they couldn’t do it all, even if they wanted to, unless the economy started roaring again or they dropped their insistence on a balanced budget with a $3-billion contingency fund.”

That is, the Green Shift is, as Simpson says, “a political loser” despite being the right thing to do. The externality of climate change must be imposed, Simpson says, upon everybody because otherwise the market will fail. This whole campaign keeps reminding me more and more of Jimmy Carter forcing the country to swallow the bitter pill of anti-inflationary policy.

The problem is that Dion isn’t in power yet.