Signing a written contract with separatists isn't normal

Metro News -- the commuter newspaper with a circulation of nearly 1 million readers across Canada -- asked me to write an op-ed about the Parliamentary kerfuffle. I can't find it online, but they sent me a copy of it in a .pdf format, which you can read here.

It's pretty short -- as is the style of the newspaper. But I can sum it up even more briefly: the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition failed for three reasons:

1. Liberal partisans are fuelled by a deep personal antipathy towards Stephen Harper, so almost any scheme to get rid of him is justified in their minds. But the rest of the country isn't hyper-partisan and angry at the man.

2. The media, especially the Parliamentary Press Gallery, is hostile to Harper and sympathetic to the Liberals. That's partly ideological, and partly personal -- remember, the PPG even had a sort of "strike" against covering Harper a couple of years ago. Using the media as a "focus group" for a coup isn't a good barometer of public opinion.

3. The Liberals, NDP and the media are all numb to the shocking nature of the Bloc, with whom they've rubbed shoulders for 18 years on Parliament Hill. Normal Canadians aren't so cavalier -- again, something that the media sounding board missed.

Just my two bits -- what do you think?