When a former Member of Parliament, ‘crossed the floor’ from the Conservatives to the Liberal Party, someone remarked devilishly that they weren’t surprised because she didn’t have a conservative bone inside her body…except occasionally when the Minister of Defense would venture to her house.

While this quip is mostly irrelevant, the context of it is useful. I have an inborn repulse to any political party self-styled as ‘Tory’ or ‘Conservative’. So when the opportunity to bid adieu to the Conservatives come, I am usually elated.

But what is the alternative? A Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition?This was the 2009 strategy tried once before by the Dion-Layton-Duceppe trio. It will be embarrassingly remembered as a time of bluster and waffle and euphemism. Recently, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was asked rather bluntly if he endorsed a coalition; an answer came there none.

But recall momentarily the enragement of many when Harper prorogued government on December 30, 2009. He had temporarily cancelled parliament to avoid an election and protestation soon followed. As I watched protestors at Yonge&Dundas I thought to myself: ‘why are people mad that the government is gone!?’

When have you ever thought to yourself, “hmm…that was a really good law they just made,” or “I’m really happy with what Ottawa has achieved today”?  Everything the government does that you don’t like, they do when in parliament. They can’t do the things you don’t like when they are not.

The political class has made it pretty explicit in 2011 that the public is deemed unfit to know how taxes are going to be spent. As the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives explains, “for every dollar explicitly allocated in the budget…$7.50 is devoted to uncosted, unreported Harper priorities such as new jails and corporate tax cuts”

Take your side on the issues, but a ratio of $7.50 to $1 is a verifiable index of how much we are getting bullshitted.

An old stock in trade of parliamentary systems is the practice of ‘triangulation’: pacify and outdo the opposition party by stealing its policies and its voter base. With the 2011 budget, the Conservative Party nicked the NDP’s wardrobe and induced an election that could achieve for Harper, his coveted majority.

The Harper Government advanced a budget that effusively distributes tax credits and welfare-style measures to most of the NDP’s social strongholds: public services and credits for the elderly, the poor, single-mothers, etc. Such credits are meager by way of money, but the gesture is an election platform.

Jack Layton is reported to have health issues that are significant enough to supplant his political career. The strategy of the Harper Government is to cut down the NDP fraction of the coalition and admit parts of it into the horrible gelatinous blob that the conservative party is. The Conservative Party is itself a congealed formation of the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party since 2003.

In 2009, and writing in response to Harper’s prorogation, the poet Joe Rosenblatt inked this:

This house appears and disappears at his command.

Rejecting this bovine practice is the only responsible position in this election. Prime Minister Harper should ask the Queen to dissolve parliament permanently. Then she should dissolve herself. Once complete, we can get to the task of conducting ourselves properly.