[LINK] "Left-wing lock: Will the NDP and Liberals split the progressive vote?"

[rfmcdonald]

Martin Patriquin of MacLean's suggests that, despite a possible anti-Conservative majority, vote-splitting between the Liberals and the NDP could undermine that majority.

Bitter political enemies Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair will go at it alone in the 2015 election. The Liberal Party leader and his NDP homologue have all but ruled out any sort of non-aggression pact even as both parties chase the left-leaning electorate. “There are some very, very big impediments to forming a coalition with the NDP. Which is why I am against it,” Trudeau recently told Postmedia News.

Few people are happier about this than Conservative MP Erin O’Toole. On several key policies, he says, the NDP and the Liberals seem to be morphing into one progressive blob. It raises the distinct possibility of a split in the progressive vote in the 2015 election—and thus making O’Toole’s job on the Conservative’s re-election campaign team that much easier. Trudeau’s denial of a potential coalition aside, O’Toole sees the Conservatives bringing up the possibility of such a thing during the election campaign. “I don’t think Canadians would be comfortable with a firm left coalition of NDP and Liberals.”

The two parties are undeniably close on a variety of issues. Both were against Canada’s participation in the mission against Islamic State; both are in favour of a loosening of Canada’s marijuana laws—decriminalization in the NDP’s case, legalization for the Liberals. Both favour some form of childcare strategy, and have made loud noises about the strains on the country’s middle class. Under leader Thomas Mulcair, the NDP’s position on Israel has edged closer to that of the Liberals, while the Liberal Party has begun courting the NDP’s traditional territory of organized labour.

The Liberals’ leftward tilt is in part to regain territory in Quebec, where the party has yet to fully recover from its scandal-plagued tenure in the mid-2000s. Trudeau’s decision to oppose the mission in Iraq played well in Quebec, where support for military intervention is typically the lowest in the country. The NDP has the lion’s share of the seats in the province, and Mulcair remains the most popular federal leader, according to polls. Yet Trudeau has revived the Liberal brand somewhat in Quebec, and the party has far outpaced its opposition in fundraising numbers.

Liberal and NDP operatives tend to tiptoe around a potential split of the progressive vote—though without publicly acknowledging the similarities between the parties. “The Liberal Party must work hard to show a more responsible, more progressive vision for the country,” says Liberal Party communications director Kate Purchase, who says there will be “robust competition between the NDP and the Liberal Party.” NDP national director Anne McGrath, meanwhile, says the progressive vote can’t be split. “That would imply that the Liberals are a progressive party,” she tells Maclean’s.