Much ado about nothing, unless ...

Stephen Harper is running among the very worst campaigns that I've ever seen, and the Goddamn Liberal Media is finally saying what I have been for months now: that if he only wins a minority, he's finished.

But even with an awesomely shitty campaign, Harper's still ahead by nearly ten points. That says more about what nutless wonders the opposition Liberals are than it does about the skill of the Tories. However, that ten point lead doesn't constitute a majority. The fact is that a good share of Harper's support comes from the Prairies, where they already hold most of the seats, meaning that support is effectively wasted. Given that, I don't see how a Tory majority is elected with less than about 43% of the vote, a level they have yet to hit even for a day.

So Harper's doing something so incredibly stupid that I'm amazed that no one in the party tried to stop him. He's running against the uber-scary Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois "coalition." That must have seemed like a great idea at the time, but it isn't working. I've already noted the inherent danger in this strategy. If you make the coalition that ballot question, you essentially legitimize it if you fail to win a majority. Of course, that won't stop the Conservatives from trying to have it both ways after the election, but that's only because they were born without shame.

There's one thing that my international readers need to understand about a parliamentary democracy. The only thing required of the government is that it enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons. It matters not at all who won the most votes if that party cannot win that confidence. To Americans, the nearest applicable equivalent would be the Electoral College. As they may or may not know, four presidents lost the popular vote, yet wound up living in the White House.

And because Michael Ignatieff is singularly unserious about actually winning an election, he's now openly talking about that, despite having ruled out a coalition as recently as last week.

Michael Ignatieff is saying clearly for the first time that he could defeat a minority Conservative government and make a case to the Governor-General that his party could govern with the support of others – and without another trip to the polls.

Until now, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has only said the party that wins the most seats on May 2 can “try” to win the confidence of the House of Commons. While the comment carried an obvious implication, he spelled it out for the first time Tuesday.

“Let’s run it right out so we’re all clear,” Mr. Ignatieff said in a live interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

“If [Conservative Leader Stephen] Harper wins the most seats and forms a government but does not secure the confidence of the House, and I’m assuming Parliament comes back, then it goes to the Governor-General. That’s what happens. That’s how the rules work.

“And then, if the Governor-General wants to call on other parties – or myself, for example – to try and form a government, then we try and form a government. That’s exactly how the rules work and what I’m trying to say to Canadians is I understand the rules, I respect the rules, I’ll follow them to the letter and I’m not going to form a coalition,” he said.

Iggy is technically correct, of course, but absent a coalition or an accord, a minority government that holds about 80 out of 308 seats would be vaporized in no time and the party in power would be crushed into dust in the ensuing election. So, he's lying, stupid or both.

The Grits are the most arrogant people ever to walk the Earth. They truly are vicious swine and honestly believe that they are entitled to rule irrespective of how few seats they actually win at the ballot box. And, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, this is what will ultimately blow up any formal arrangement with the NDP until the NDP starts picking the meat off of their corpses.

If you look at the negotiating points from the 2008-09 coalition/merger talks, you quickly notice that the Liberals were demanding huge sacrifices from the New Democrats while refusing to give them real power or responsibility. Since the alternative for the Grits was to vote with Tory minority governments until the end of time, which would annihilate their credibility as an alternative, they Dippers would have to be nuts to agree to that. And the NDP has always suffered every time that it has supported a Liberal minority.

If it comes down to defeating a Throne Speech or a big-spending Flaherty budget this summer, I don't see anything coming from it, simply because it isn't in Jack Layton's political interest. While Ignatieff might be a political neophyte, Layton would need to be borderline retarded to support the Liberals without getting a lot more from them than they're willing to give.

But the Conservatives have set a time-bomb for themselves that could blow them up the minute Parliament resumes sitting. That would be the Auditor General's G8 report, a leaked draft of which alleges that the Tories used summit and border security money to feather the nest of Conservative ridings in the area, particularly that of Industry Minister Tony Clement, and lied to Parliament about it. The Tories political flacks have been running around the country saying that it was only a draft that leaked and the final report will clear them, even though there's no way that they can now that. This is commonly known as lying, maybe you've heard of it.

If that final report is released and says essentially says the same thing as the draft, the Harper government is finished. At that point, you're getting awfully close to violations of the criminal law. The three opposition parties will have little choice but to defeat the government at the earliest opportunity, and I don't think that the country would mind all that much. You would then have a demonstrably criminal government, every bit as bad as the Liberals were in the darkest days of the Sponsorship Scandal.

Under those circumstances, the dynamics change dramatically. If the Grits are ever to win government, that would be their best chance to do it. And that puts Jack Layton in the driver's seat. Ignatieff is half-crazed if he thinks that the Governor General will allow a party with only 80 seats to take power under those circumstances, absent some sort of written guarantee that it could survive longer than a few weeks. Failing that, the GG could opt for an election, which a bankrupt Liberal Party would be destroyed in. At that point, Layton gets whatever he wants.

And you know what? That'll be, despite his obviously dishonest protestations to the contrary, the House that Harper built. He's hoping that if he lies enough to get through the writ period, the G8 report will just go away or he can spin it out of existence. I don't think that he can do that. I think that it will be explosively bad and his allowing his flacks to lie about it makes it even worse.

I've always said that if Harper doesn't win a majority on May 2, he'll announce his intention to resign that night. If his minority is defeated by his G8 shenanigans, he'll be eaten alive by his own party. Everybody in the Cabinet thinks that they're going to be Harper's successor, but none of them wants to wind up like poor Paul Martin did, holding the bag for Jean Chretien's scandal.

In more ways than one, Stephen Harper may wind up being the author of his own political destruction.