He should have done what Stephen Harper accused him of doing: he should have made an alliance with the NDP.
That is the opinion of Warren Kinsella, the long-time Liberal strategist who was on Ignatieff’s staff until Kinsella resigned when his – and some of his colleagues’ – advice was ignored. He published his version of the story in the July/August edition of Walrus.
Long before the election, Kinsella writes, Ignatieff had the opportunity “to craft a deal with the NDP for cooperation, or a coalition, or even a merger.” He emphatically said no. “In June 2010, with his former leadership rivals Bob Rae and Dominique LeBlanc standing behind him in a House of Commons hallway soberly nodding their heads, he declared that he wanted nothing to do with the NDP. Forming an alliance with them was ridiculous.” That declaration gave Stephen Harper what he most desired.
For the last three elections, Harper had remained in office with the support of no more than 40 percent of the electorate. “If some, or all, of the other 60 percent were to come together in a single, formidable force, the Conservatives would be defeated…. [Today] a united Liberal–New Democratic option would benefit both parties. The two neatly offset each other’s weaknesses. Liberals have gravitas and experience in governing. The NDP has a robust fundraising ability, as well as a strong relationship with its grassroots, both lingering Grit deficiencies.”
Of course, there were other reasons for Ignatieff’s defeat. Kinsella believes the timing of the election was all wrong, and so was the Liberals’ inability to deal with the Conservatives’ highly effective negative advertising campaign. But these were secondary causes.
The Liberals should have learned a lesson from the tragedy of the Weimar Republic. (This is not in Kinsella’s article.) In Germany, in the ’thirties, the Left was divided. United, it could easily have prevented the Nazis’ rise to power.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Seems to me that the observed course of the campaign that followed Ignatieff’s “no-coalition” declaration less than a year later, and the results of the election, cast grave doubt on the thesis that “That declaration gave Stephen Harper what he most desired.”
What Harper subsequently did in fact was to effectively raise, in one stump speech after another, the spectre of a leftist coalition, citing as evidence the very fact that those devils were denying it all the while. And you know what? The people bought it! The conservative majority might well be considered proof that the electorate believed in, and rejected, the (wholly manufactured) prospect of a Liberal/NDP coalition.
Let us gather in four years to discuss this again.
It’s hard to know who was more destructive of the Left in Weimar – the Nazis or the Left itself. As we now know, the KPD was wholly under Moscow’s command. The SPD was riven with factionalism including the notion of “no enemies on the left” movement which pushed them under the sway of the Communists. The remnants of the Freikorps became the street toughs who did the Nazis bully boy work for Hitler through the SD who were then able to terrorize effectively. But aside from the historical alphabet soup, are we saying that we now live in pre-Fascist times? The events now unfolding in Europe may bear this out.
No, “we” were not thinking along those lines. “We” were merely making an observation about political strategy. “We” are too cowardly to make a prediction about the consequences of the crisis in Europe. But “we” can easily be persuaded to believe, as Chris Hedges does, that the United States – perhaps not only the United States – is ALREADY living under a form of corporate fascism.
I think it is more simple than that. Michael never had the common touch to connect with Canadians. And Bob Rae had burned through his political capital long before.
Chris Hedges is a good tip, thanks.
A year ago, October 2010 on TVO’s The Agenda, Hedges was interviewed by Steve Paikin on “The Death of the Liberal Class’, and was debated by three other guys.
http://ww3.tvo.org/video/165539/chris-hedges-liberal-class – 14 min
http://ww3.tvo.org/video/164706/death-liberal-class – 37 min
Their understandings are worth trying on again today.
Hedges: The evidence of controlling oligarchy is increasingly clear, and it’s damaging us. It’s a true concern that the liberal class has blown its political function as a safe & morally credible pathway for moderating and incorporating new social movements.
Salam: As a North American guy whose family in BanglaDesh has suffered the frustrations of human hopes and enterprise that political instability brings, I prefer the human and democratic risks brought by regimes that enforce political stability as the priority.
Keller: Go easy – we’re not without democratic and social faults, but I don’t see a conspiracy here. And things aren’t so bad. In fact they’ve been improving. Be fair.
Fetterman: Something new and significant IS going on.
Now there’s the ‘occupy’ movement. It may be a smooth beast slouching toward public spaces to be born. Or it may not.
Naomi Klein ( http://tinyurl.com/3uksujd ), a Canadian who’s arguably in the international company of Sahra Wagenknecht ( http://www.sahra-wagenknecht.de/de ) and Camila Vallejo ( http://tinyurl.com/3e4r7m2 ), is encouraging ‘Occupy’ to get organized to be effective http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/10/naomi-klein-occupy-wall-street-get-organized.
Last weekend, Maude Barlow ( http://tinyurl.com/6kndjdy ), in the comfortable radical centre with the Council of Canadians, spoke at their conference in Montreal. The ‘Indignez-vous’ theme honoured France’s still active WW II resistance fighter Stephane Hessel, and supports the ‘occupy’ movement.
People are working toward political outcomes without waiting for the next federal election.
If my grandmother had wheels, she could have been a bus.