During this campaign, Stephane Dion has been giving lessons on how to play a bad hand badly.

Last week Jack Layton hinted (it was a very mild hint) that he might be willing to consider forming a coalition government with the Liberals. The suggestion was that even if the Conservatives ranked first in seats, provided that the NDP and the Liberals had more seats between them they could defeat the Harper government in the Commons and then form a coalition ministry. The Liberals and the NDP combined to do exactly that in the Ontario Legislature in 1985. Although they did not establish a formal coalition, they did work out a common agenda, a progressive one at that.

Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada is a hybrid of two parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party. The two merged, or more realistically, the Canadian Alliance acquired the PCs in December 1993.

In its traditions, the Conservative Party does not trace its origins back to the Liberal-Conservative Party (known as the Conservative Party at the time) of John A. Macdonald.

The roots of Harper's party are in Calgary, where the Conservative leader has his own seat.

Three women I know had dinner in Toronto a couple of nights ago and they talked about the election campaign. In their early fifties, they're all on the left, with a range of attitudes that we can call socialist, social democrat, pro union, anti capitalist.

One of them told me about the conversation.

They're alienated from the Liberals because they see them as too pro business and lacking in principle.

They're suspicious of the NDP. They think the way Jack Layton helped bring down the Martin government to trigger the 2006 election opened the door to Harper. Instead of childcare and Kelowna, we got Harper, they insist, and Layton did nothing to warn Canadians about the Conservatives.

There was a time when being named leader of the federal Liberal Party was a virtual guarantee that a politician was going to become Prime Minister of Canada. Edward Blake was the only Liberal leader who never made it. John Turner, of course, was PM for only three months and failed to win an election. Since 1867, Liberal leaders, not counting Stephane Dion, have served as Prime Minister for an average of eight years each. Collectively they have governed the country for eighty of the one hundred and forty-one years since Confederation.

The glory days of the Liberal Party began in 1896 with the election of Wilfrid Laurier as Prime Minister. Seventy-five of their eighty years in power have been since then.