A trickle that will lead to a torrent

Frank Valeriote does not favour a coalition government and instead hopes Prime Minister Stephen Harper can work toward rescuing the Canadian economy.

“I believe in working toward a solution, not working toward a coalition,” Guelph’s Liberal MP said Wednesday.

Valeriote added he does not believe a Liberal-NDP coalition, with support from the Bloc Quebecois, will unseat the Tories.

“I have given no thought to that,” Valeriote said when asked whether he saw himself in a cabinet role under such an arrangement. “I am not, frankly, anticipating moving into government.”

Pretty simple, really.

Until now, it's just been party elders, ranging from Frank McKenna to John Manley to Sarkis Assadourian to Ray Heard who have spoken against it. Valeriote is the first Liberal in the caucus -- someone who could, theoretically, be "punished" by Stephane Dion for his dissidence and, contrapositively, someone who is removing himself from the pork and patronage queue that Dion has offered as temptations. (Elizabeth May, by contrast, has elbowed herself to the front of the line in her hopes of becoming a senator. Of course she has; unlike Valeriote, May doesn't have to maintain her constituents' support. She has none to begin with.)

I expect Valeriote will be the first of many, now that the taboo is broken.

I have noted previously that Michael Ignatieff has been curiously quiet on the Bloc coalition. He has not spoken against it, but neither has he been a cheerleader for it. I think he predicted early on what other MPs are learning from their constituency offices empirically: inviting the Bloc Quebecois into government is just as repulsive to liberal Canadians as it is to Conservatives, at least in English Canada. If an election were held on this matter, coalition MPs would be crushed. 

I sense some of this fear trickling back to Ottawa. I watched with great interest as Mike Duffy interviewed Keith Martin and Peter Julian, Liberal and NDP MPs from British Columbia. Both conceded to Duff that their offices had indeed received a large number of critical phone calls -- they wouldn't acknowledge how many -- and they seemed chastened. Their talk was conciliatory, not bellicose; they spoke of economic recovery and cooperation -- none of the attack language that we've heard from Dion lately. True, they tried to write off some of the criticism they've received as "astroturf" -- that is, fake grassroots. But I think that was just for show -- the two of them sounded concerned.

I've always liked Martin -- he's one of my heroes in the fight for freedom of speech. He won his election by less than 100 votes over his Conservative opponent. Peter Julian had a more comfortable margin of victory. But, gentle reader, do you really think either wants to explain to their voters why they abided Quebec separatists? Not just that, but why they transfered political power, en masse, from loyal British Columbians to separatist Quebeckers -- further disenfranchising B.C., which is already under-represented, in terms of MPs in Parliament? Dion doesn't care -- he knows he'll only be prime minister for a short while; his career is over. But young MPs like Martin and Julian aren't done yet. They still have to meet their voters again.

This helps to explain, I think, why Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not as contrite and compromising as the sages in the Parliamentary Press Gallery all predicted he would be in his remarks tonight. Like Valeriote, Martin, Julian and even Ignatieff, he knows how this is going over in the "rest of Canada". He didn't want a constitutional crisis; he withdrew the several most controversial items from his suite of legislative proposals after 48 hours of intense push-back from the Opposition.

On Monday, we had the engagement -- a betrothal, whereby the Liberals, NDP and Bloc offered eachother political matrimony. The consummation of that marriage will not take place until the non-confidence vote on Monday -- or later, if Parliament prorogues. But even before the honeymoon, it looks like some in this trio are already calling up divorce lawyers.