Those Merger Rumours

So, as Mordaith pointed out to me, there are persistent rumours floating about regarding a Liberal-NDP merger - despite both parties' best efforts to quash such rumours. This idea is being floated simply to defeat the next Harper government (a worthy goal, make no mistake)... That is, not because the parties have a lot of common ground in terms of policy (they don't), but because they oppose so much of the PC agenda.

This is a terrible idea, of course, and not only because giving voters less choice is usually a bad thing, nor simply because without the NDP Canada will lose its only true left-wing party. No, besides those reasons, it's a bad idea because, as DemocraticSPACE points out, these parties would better spend their energy elsewhere:

Single-party federal majorities are becoming a thing of the past. No single party is truly national. We have a party whose support is largely rural and suburban (Conservatives), a party whose support is largely urban (Liberals), a party whose support is largely in heavily unionized areas (NDP), and a party whose support is in Quebec (Bloc). I don’t see this fundamentally changing any time soon. These are natural tendencies, given different shared interests.

And Canada has been living with a minority government for six years already. We’ve been operating in a situation where one party has to count on the support of another on an issue-by-issue basis. That would be fine if not for our voting system, which is the very thing that creates uncertainty and instability. Why? Because minute shifts in public sentiment can reward one party with a bounty of seats won by narrow margins. So we see endless games on Parliament Hill. A better (more stable) situation instead of perpetual minorities governments and political charades would be stable two-party coalitions, which would be the most common result of a more proportional voting system.

Head over to DemocraticSPACE for the full article. It's worth the read.