...means never having to say you're Tory.

Allan, thanks so much for having waded through all of these poll results. The consensus is pretty clear - people are not with the coalition right now, and are really doubtful that the coalition (or anyone in government right now, or that matter) are actually looking out for anyone other than themselves. This is a really scary time, because the jockeying for control has started to take up way too much time and the country is going nowhere fast.

It's time for the Liberals to wake up and realize that the coalition is a bad idea if they want to say with a straight face that they're the ones who know what they're doing to fix the economy. First, a caveat: the Liberals know what they are doing best to fix the economy, and to run the economy well without fixing the deficit. Here is a graph I made during the last election, showing the federal budget surplus/deficit:
Blue parts are Tory governments and red ones are Grits. As is pretty clear, Conservatives correspond to bad times for fiscal management. (That tail down towards deficit at the future end of the graph is based on early-October predictions, and therefore is likely far too optimistic). Brilliant fiscal policies like the GST cut have failed to increase consumption while seriously draining the revenue flow for the government.

However, this new coalition beast is something different entirely - it's not the Liberals calling the shots anymore, but the Liberals backed up by the NDP and the BQ. With their anemic approval ratings, the Liberals know they can't afford an election, so they have to work to appease the free-spending lefties who are used to being third and fourth parties who can call for billions of dollars towards their pet projects and regions with no political cost and no impact on the government's fiscal discipline and restraint. This will obviously be pretty difficult - as Rick Mercer points out,

In theory, a coalition could work. If aliens from outer space were running roughshod over the country, perhaps a Liberal, a socialist and a separatist could put their differences aside and work together to defeat the alien overlords. A global economic crisis, however, is probably not enough for these three wildly divergent visions of Canada to gel.

Being Rick Mercer, he of course puts it better than I had ever hoped to. The coalition is a bad idea, both for the Canadian economy and - as Allan has pointed out with the polls - for the Liberal Party. MPs are starting to realize this, including leadership candidate Ignatieff and theoretical-PM-in-waiting Dion, who's hedging his bets by looking for "monumental change" on the budget in exchange for Liberal support. Everyone is backing away from the edge, and proroguement is giving the Liberals a chance to re-think their strategy.

At this point, it's time for Dion to go. I'm sorry. I liked him, with his geekiness and his technocratic image and promise of rational progressive governance - but this whole coalition deal, and its poor handling (the visuals did look a little like YouTube, when he seized control of the airways earier this week) show that he's just not cut out for the job. At the same time, the Liberals should be working to figure out what they can do to prepare to fight an election. Here's my six-point plan:

1. Get rid of Dion. He's way too central to the party's image, and he's not doing a great job crafting or sustaining routes to power. Replace him with McCallum or Goodale or someone until the election.


2. Get out of the coalition. Say it's not working, not in Canadian's interest. Criticize the NDP and the BQ, and say they are difficult to work with. They were only going to demand political pork and ruin the economy anyway.


3. Support the budget in January. The Conservatives have made concessions and will probably try to make more by way of pandering by the time the budget actually comes out at the end of January. It won't be a lot, but honestly, the Liberals can afford neither the coalition nor an imminent election.


4. Come up with a decent economic recovery plan, full of specifics for MPs and candidates to point at and say, "look what we, as the Liberal Party, are specifically promising to you".


5. Make the convention, in May in Vancouver, a big event. Make surprising announcements. Get as many people out there as possible. Raise the media profile of the party.


6. Get ready for an election in the fall or summer - maybe even as early as the spring, before the leadership convention. This will mean fundraisers, riding events, and lots of work to convince those disaffected by the coalition to come back to the party fold.

This is all assuming, of course, that the Liberals are willing to take action to step back, realize what they're doing, and start focusing on what they can do to fix their party and the country's economy. At this point, none of the parties are acting responsibly, and Parliament is broken. Rick Mercer, one more time:

If this Parliament were a dog, it would be brought out behind the shed and shot. Rabid dogs aren't prorogued, reformed or trusted.