With great risks often come great opportunities. But not necessarily in this nascent election campaign. As the federal parties hit the trail for the fourth time in seven years, Michael Ignatieff is playing double or nothing with a pair of dice loaded in favour of Stephen Harper.

Consider the following: if the public opinion trends observed over the past few months are consolidated in the five-week lead-up to the May 2 vote, the next Parliament could feature a Conservative majority government sitting across from a sovereignist official Opposition.

Polls show that Harper and Gilles Duceppe are both starting the campaign with some wind in their backs and a solid, committed, core vote. Given the right Conservative campaign, a Harper majority — crafted outside Quebec and mostly at the expense of the Liberals — could be at hand.

And, while on Day One of the campaign, a future House of Commons dominated by the Conservatives and the Bloc is not the most likely outcome of the vote, it is no longer strictly a figment of political science fiction.

Almost two decades have elapsed since the Bloc last vaulted to second place in a federal election and over the time since Jean Chrétien’s 1993 victory, the dynamics between Canada’s two main parties have changed dramatically, to the point that as the 2011 campaign gets underway, their roles are basically reversed.

While most Liberals would scoff at the notion of a 20-plus seat loss on May 2, Kim Campbell’s Tories went into the 1993 campaign in much better shape in the polls and with a more popular leader than Ignatieff’s Liberals . . . and finished with two seats.

On Brian Mulroney’s watch, the Conservative coalition had imploded. That implosion paved the way for the devastating Tory result. On election day, Campbell bled votes to the Bloc, the Reform Party and the Liberals. The party never recovered from that hemorrhage.

In this campaign, Ignatieff is fighting the NDP, the BQ and the Greens for the anti-Conservative vote, on top of having to guard his right flank against the most concerted Conservative bid for centre-right Liberal votes in decades. In contrast with Campbell, Ignatieff is the only rookie leader in the race. His opponents all have one or more elections under their belts.

With Tory Quebec and Conservative Alberta strongly leaning to the Bloc and the Reform Party, respectively, at the outset of the 1993 campaign, Campbell desperately needed to hold Ontario to have a shot at a decent election showing.

Similarly, to avoid flaming out over the course of his electoral baptism of fire, Ignatieff simply cannot afford to lose an inch of ground in Ontario. His party is starting from nowhere across much of Western Canada and the Liberals are as close to extinction in Quebec as they have ever been.

Polls commissioned in the lead-up to the election show the Liberals entering the campaign at a historic low in Quebec, in fourth place behind the Bloc, the Conservatives and the NDP among crucial francophone voters.

That being said, for all of its wear-and-tear the Liberal brand Ignatieff will be championing in this campaign is in better shape than the battered Tory brand Campbell inherited from Mulroney in 1993. The Duceppe/Harper/ Layton/May quartet is also less formidable than the Jean Chrétien/Preston Manning/Lucien Bouchard trio.

When Campbell went into her first campaign, she inspired such high expectations that she would have had to be able to walk on water to live up to them.

Given his lacklustre ratings going in the campaign, surpassing expectations should be the least of Ignatieff’s problems.

After the dust settled on the 1993 Tory collapse, autopsies of the disaster revealed that even with a brilliant campaign under leadership runner-up Jean Charest — who had become more popular than Campbell over their battle for the top job — the party would have been lucky to finish with three dozen seats. Under any scenario, the decks were stacked against a Tory victory.

Eighteen years later, there are also systemic hurdles that would be hard for any Liberal leader to overcome between now and May 2.

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Among them is a Liberal foundation that has been crumbling for so long in the Prairies and in francophone Quebec that its remnants are barely visible, and a highly competitive NDP and a Bloc Québécois that has taken over the niche the Liberals use to own in Quebec under Pierre Trudeau and become the default federal choice of one in two francophone voters.

By all indications, the Liberals are entering the highest-risk campaign of their modern history. It will be worth watching.

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