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By Lloyd Mackey
 HERE ARE a few tentative thoughts on the occasion of Stephane Dion's moderately long goodbye.
He told the assembled media, on Monday afternoon, that he would resign, effective, for all practical purposes, when a new Liberal leader is chosen next spring.
From where I sit, that makes good sense for Parliament, the Conservatives and the Liberals.
For the Liberals, the rebuilding process has barely begun. Remember, it took 15 years to get the conservative movement from the end of the Mulroney era to the election of a second and strengthened minority government in 2008.
The numbers are interesting, so please bear with me for a moment.
In 1993, 52 Reformers and two Progressive Conservatives (PC) were elected. The Liberals won 177 seats.
The 1997 election saw Reform form the official opposition with 60 seats and the PCs electing 20. The Liberals dropped to 155.
The Canadian Alliance (CA) -- Reform's successor -- elected 66 in 2000 and the PCs dropped to 12. The Liberals climbed again, to 172.
In 2001, the Democratic Representative-Progressive Conservative (PC-DR) coalition, formed in the wake of Stockwell Day's CA leadership difficulties, reduced the Alliance to 58. The PC-DR coalition held 20 seats, 12 for the PCs and eight for the DRs.
When Stephen Harper became CA leader, the DRs went back to the Alliance and the CA-PC merger moved ahead with a combined 78 seats.
In 2004, the newly merged Conservatives took 99 seats. The Liberals won 135 seats in a minority Liberal house.
The minority Conservative government obtained 124 seats in 2006 and the Liberals were reduced to 103.
And now, with the October 14 election results, the Conservatives have 143 and the Liberals are down to 76, approximately what the newly-merged Conservatives had in 2001.
All of which is to say that the Liberals, with some fluctuations, have been in slow decline since Jean Chretien won power in 1993, and conservatism, in its various mutations, gained strength.
Of course the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc Quebecois played marginal but significant roles in this process.
My point is that it took a long time to rebuild the Conservatives after the 1993 rout, and it will probably take just as long to bring the Liberals back to strength, if 2008 is the low mark. The Conservatives likely have a little more room for growth, if the present trend lines continue, with their making further inroads into the suburbs and cities, in most or all parts of Canada.
There are interesting questions about Quebec, of course. I don't know if we know the real answers yet, with respect to the fact that the Tories were not able to move the flag further in this election. It should be noted, however, that they did not lose any significant ground between 2006 and now. Some predictions had suggested that they might drop from 10 seats to six. That did not happen.
My own peripheral analysis -- I come from Vancouver and don't speak French -- is that the new generation successors to the old Mulroney Conservative base that went to the Bloc in the late '80s were not quite ready to trust the Harper Tories, despite les Quebecois' newly-won "nation within Canada" status. They have parked in the Bloc lot to wait and see if a little cultural redefinition among the Harperites might make them more tolerable next time around.
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That, then, is the analysis.
Now here are a few thoughts on how outgoing Liberal Leader Dion and incrementally-strengthening Prime Minister Harper might function during the next 33 months or so, to make parliament work.
Unlike those who made fun of Dion for sitting out many confidence votes in the last Parliament, I would like to suggest that he keep on doing so, perhaps with some adjustments in the optics of that strategy.
There are enough 'blue Liberals' left in his caucus that he would do well to encourage them to vote with the Conservatives any time the proposed legislation -- Tory-like though it be -- does not violate any principles held by centre-leaning Liberals.
And I would encourage the Harper Tories not to ridicule such actions, in the interests of having Parliament work with the best of goodwill available in a naturally-adversarial setting. Certainly it could be argued the economic imperatives militate for this.
On election night, all party leaders expressed the desire to work together. The prime minister actually used the word "inclusive" -- a term that has come to take on some outreaching meaning in the world of Christian faith practice. It can be noted that he has utilized that kind of outreach in the past seven years of party-building and should be able to continue working at it beyond the traditional conservative borders.
In the debates, one questioner asked each of the party leaders to say something good about the person sitting to his or her left. Harper was the only one of the five who kept his statement entirely constructive. The person to his left, ironically, was Jack Layton, his philosophical opposite.
He spoke of Layton's and his NDP's collaborative and co-operative action in the last Parliament, pointing specifically to their role in the residential schools apology and the implementation of the Accountability Act. And he declared Layton an "honest" person.
Layton appeared nonplussed and momentarily moved as he received this cordially-offered accolade.
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I have spoken in recent weeks of the emerging coalition-building and power-sharing arrangements in such countries as Germany, Zimbabwe and Kenya. The crises and the antidotes proposed in each of those situations are at some variance to what prevails or what is needed in Canada. But there are things to be learned, for Canada, from each nation.
And now may be a historically-appropriate time to do such learning.
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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa. He is author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006) and More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005). He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
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There are lessons to learn from the fate of Rahim Jaffer
In Edmonton-Strathcona, a riding engineered such that the votes of rich neighbourhoods have traditionally drowned out the voices at the University of Alberta, Rahim Jaffer met his unexpected Waterloo; ahead for much of the night, Canada's first-ever Muslim MP watched in dismay as late campus polls threw the race to New Democrat Linda Duncan.
Colby Cosh, National Post, October 17
October 23/2007
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