Ottawa

At the risk of applying logic to the PM’s latest fixation (UPDATED)

Stephen Harper has developed some obscure sort of Tourette’s or something that makes him blurt out warnings about a coalition everywhere he goes. “They work together on everything,” he said recently.

The prime minister’s argument, as we’ve explained here at some length and with some frequency since he first test-drove it in an interview with my boss 20 months ago, is that “somebody will have a majority” after the next election: either the pure and stalwart Conservatives, or the moustache-twirling Coalition of the Lefties, Snobs and Nation-Wreckers.

Right then. The Conservatives currently have 146 144 seats in the House of Commons. If they win 148 at the next election, will Stephen Harper concede defeat on election night and recommend that the governor general invite Michael Ignatieff to form the government?

UPDATE: A reader on Twitter provides the answer, also from the PM’s abundant oeuvre on the question at hand: “Losers don’t get to form coalitions.” To sum up then, the complete Harper doctrine on coalitions: Somebody will have a majority after the next election, unless it isn’t me.

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