A lonesome figure stands at the top of an escalator on the first day of the Liberal convention handing out a homemade one-page leaflet. His message: no truck or trade, no negotiations -- and absolutely no merger! -- with the New Democrats.

Most delegates ignore him -- not because they might favour such a merger. They simply have better things to do, and the leaflet-er just seems to be another of the usual crop of zealots and cranks looking for a platform that these events inevitably attract.

One well-dressed, older gentlemen does stop to chat for a moment.

"I thought we had put that idea to bed," the natty delegate says. "It's off the agenda isn't it?"

Just the other day, it was said by one of the usual suspects in one of the usual places that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada now sees itself as having inherited the mantle of the country's "natural governing party" from the woebegone Liberals.

It is certainly true that this could happen if the dice roll the Conservatives' way, as so far they have. But this potential outcome notwithstanding, the so-called Conservatives -- who despite their honourable history are nowadays neither really conservative nor truly a national party -- face considerable roadblocks to their great ambition.

In the last hours of the 2011 federal election campaign, as word of Jack Layton's Orange Wave spread to a wondering Canada, a longtime New Democrat supporter of my acquaintance made the following observation: "If it turns out on Monday that we only win 15 seats, a lot of New Democrats will quietly say to themselves, 'Thank God!'"

During the election campaign, Layton achieved a goal that many of us thought was impossible: he turned the federal New Democratic Party into something it hadn't been for many years. To wit: a political party.

And the NDP's transition to a political party is going to be very hard on one significant group of loyal New Democrats -- those who thought the NDP was their church.

For many decades especially after the Second World War, the Liberals dominated the Quebec political scene at the federal level. Even when Canadians elected the "Progressive" Conservative Diefenbaker in the 1960s, Liberals stayed outrageously ahead. Until the late 1980s, Conservatives were unable to get more than a handful of MPs in Quebec.

The Liberal party released its comprehensive election platform today and it reminds me and a lot of other people of the Red Book trumpeted by Jean Chretien throughout the 1993 election: full of left of centre policies, reflecting the values of fairness and equality and stealing Liberally from the NDP's last election platform. It worked for the Liberals in 1993. And then, of course, they very quickly turned the book of promises into a book of lies.

It beats me why a centre-left party with the ability to squeeze even a few modest concessions out of a dangerous far-right minority government that sits on the cusp of a majority would contribute to an effort to bring that government down just now.