Pitiful.

The way Harper has wagged the so called "pundits".

I predict Wells and company will lose a whole lot of readership if status quo or a Haprper majority – it really won't matter what he/thay or what we say here, or elsewhere.

I know I'll move on.

Great stenography, not a single typo!!

Michael Ignatieff has finally come clean.

If The Conservative are given a minority by Canadians who want Mr. Harper to remain our Prime Minister.

It is the Liberal intention to topple the Conservatives and with the help of the Bloc controlled Coalition, steal the election and make Michael Ignatieff Prime Minister.

Canadians have strongly expressed their outrage at this idea more than once.

Michael Ignatieff knows this is clearly in contempt of the will of Canadians.
The Liberals do not care.
The Liberals can not win the election.
So the Liberals will steal it if we let them.

If you do not want a Bloc controlled Coalition with Michael Ignatieff as Prime Minister.

We have to give the Conservatives a majority.

The future of our country is at stake.
Sleep on it, talk about it, how do we protect and keep Canada united with what we are facing.

Time and time again Iggy has said he can't work with Mr. Harper. Now he says he could possibly work with Mr. Harper? Does anyone believe he's try and work with the Conservatives if he leads a coup de etet? Has Iggy not made up his mind yet? Or is he just another lying Lieberal leader??

And Harper predicted this scenario right from the get-go. A waste of over $300 million for an unecessary election just so they could pull a repeat of 2008.

Well actually roughly 170 years of Westminster Parliamentary democracy in North America predicted this scenario.

Remember…cooperation does not equal coalition.

Or elect enough Greens to hold the balance of power, and then the Conservative meme of Liberal/NDP/Bloc becomes incorrect because it could be Liberal/Green/NDP instead. It may not happen this election, but it's coming.

I'm glad that even the most hardcore Liberal supporters think that a Liberal majority is laughable.

They don't. The party that returns with the most seats does. If, IF they can't keep the confidence of the House, then it is the decision of the GG to either dissolve Parliament or ask any of the Opposition parties if they can keep confidence.

I'm fairly certain you knew that already.

And of course Richard, we need to point out to Dennis here that Harper forced the election. The "losers" (who will no doubt get more Canadians votes than Harper again) only stood up for Canadians and did their jobs – it is Harpers fault we have an election.

Those are two separate points. Canadians may be outraged, but that's not the same as saying it's illegal/illegitimate.

Many Canadians would be outraged to learn that their Tim Horton's doughnuts aren't baked fresh for them, but that doesn't change the fact that they're only reheated on site :)

Canadians may be outraged, but, unfortunately, if Igatieff can gain and retain the confidence of the other two parties, he will be the Prime Minister for up to 5 years, reagardless of how few Canadians actually voted for him.

The difference being donuts are a tad less important than who the government must appease to stay in power. The presence of the Bloc changes everything. Unless the Liberals plus NDP have more seats than the CPC voters will be angry. A better way to look at the situation is the stock market – perception is everything.

"Ignatieff is forgeting/ignoring important precedent/convention/ tradition – that either Libs, NDP or BQ have to eat crow and vote with Cons to pass budget because Cons will have won election and the people have spoken."

That depends – Harper may try another bait-and-switch like he did with the Throne Speech in 2008… in which case I'd imagine all bets are off.

This is simply wrong. The convention in Canada is that any party that wins a plurality but not a majority recognizes that it must reach out to be fair to those voters who did not support them. You can review acceptance speeches at both the federal and provincial levels to see this is the Canadian tradition. (Indeed, typically a minority win should not be seen as providing a mandate from the people.) It is an important tradition, it says that our government should always respect the views of the Canadians majority.

The exception is of course, Joe Clark in 79, and in this case I think the exception certainly proves the convention.

Harper of course made no reference to reaching out in his last acceptance speech. Once he gained his plurality, his view has been, there was a game, I won, so I get to do what I want. He stepped down from that view when the threat of a coalition threatened his position as PM, but he has never rescinded it.

If Harper fails to get a majority, and brings in the same budget without discussions with the opposition there is absolutely no reason associated with tradition or legitimacy that compels the opposition to vote for it. After all, each and every opposition member has campaigned against this budget. To attempt to tell the majority of Canadians that because of the way the vote split that their elected representatives must change their position from the one they campaigned on to fall in line with the party supported by the minority of Canadians is at best arrogant. (Now that I have written it out it is clear it is much better described as idiotic)

It is not that I disagree that if Harper gets a strong plurality that he should be PM. Indeed, everyone has stated that he gets first shot. His responsibility is to genuinely reaches out to attempt to gain the confidence on the House. If he instead attempts to rub the opposition collective noses in an unaltered budget, then the resulting chaos is on him.

If we have status quo following the election, the determining issue will which party(ies) fear/want another quick election. That will depend on the perceptions of momentum near the end of this campaign and unfortunately money. I fear that Harper will once again have a dominant financial advantage and he will be unable to contain himself.

he's trying to stop the bleeding from the left

Harper's facing another minority…maybe even a smaller one than now.

Now I'm annoyed that I'm forced to attend a dinner tonight. I really want to see how Ezra Levant is going to handle having the CBC's Mansbridge pulling that quote out of Ignatieff! He and Lilley spent the whole night railing against the CBC and their Liberal ties and now they'll be forced to watch a real CBC journalist grilling the Liberal leader really hard.

It re-runs at 10 PM.

You can watch Ezra then. :-)

Richard, back away from the troll. It's a neverending cycle of blather!

That may be due to the low regard voters had for the Liberal party at the time, anyone seemed better than the party of Adscam. More likely it is because that coalition never came close enough to actually happening. If it had I expect the public would have been just as angry. The problem for the Liberals is that they held that awful public signing with Dion, Layton and Duceppe vs. a piece of paper no one saw with multiple and conflicting interpretations of its meaning.

Mansbridge himself said this write-up by the Conservatives was "incomplete…at best." Yes, there are a lot of other terms for it.

Sure they are but they are also responding to a very real and justified feelings of uneasiness that voters have about the Bloc. Perhaps decades of bribing and appeasing Quebec with no positive results has created a situation that leads voter to believe that a government that is at the mercy of separatists is going to be expensive and unfair to the ROC.

Right – a self-serving theory that rests on the assumption that Mansbridge et al are biased to begin with.

Don't tell ME about it pally, it's what the polls are showing.

Deliberately lying to the voters is never acceptable to anyone with half a brain. I'm sure I'll get an earful for this, but the way the CPC's numbers go up every time they lie has led me to the conclusion that we've become a nation of idiots.

BTW, for those who are suggesting Iggy really didn't MEAN what he said,

is he that tone deaf?

Waxing eloquent on the theorhetical possibilities of taking power in a minority situation when that is the singular issue of the day, and he thinks he should be shielded from the potential ramifications of that.

It's like speaking "hypothetically" about a bomb in one's suitcase in the airport. You may not REALLY mean it, but if you're so tone deaf to do that, don't be surprised if you undergo a two hour strip search.

Iggy's either being a slippery politician on the most important issue of our day,

or he's more out-of-touch that we all could have imagined.

Anyone complaining about Mansbridge's line of questioning needs a frying pan up the side of the head. Not a single thing wrong with what he asked, or, frankly, with how Ignatieff answered.

Reading all these blogs a person can take it with a grain of salt. I was thinking of trying out for politics and then remembered the one of "when can you tell when a politician is lying? when his lips start moving".

I find it suspicious that you claim you're not a "hardcord" (sic) supporter of the Liberals, given that 99.9% of your comments slavishly adhere to Liberal talking points.

I think you're one of those "Liberals" in disguise. You've posted something like 10,000 comments on this site, so show me single one that criticizes the Liberals.

Did Ignatieff really just toss his campaign….or does this simply share at the least title of a certain Shakespere play and the subject of 9 seasons of Sienfeld?

Not saying this is about nothing – but is any-one listening anymore? Even the CBC isn't listening. The National where this interview aired? They got to election related stories as the third news item, after a guy with a gun entered a school in Quebec and the floods in Manitoba. After that, if you were like me, you had switched back to the hockey game, any hockey game….

How is a government elected by a small minority of Canadians more democratic than a coalition representing the majority of their votes? Canada needs to finally get the memo on this issue—as it seems do you, Mr. Wells.

74% of Canadians think penguins live in the Arctic.

This IS a nation of idiots.