MONTREAL

W hat would it take for Parliament to return to majority rule? If the new normal at the federal level is a deadlocked public opinion, can politics as usual ever provide either of the main parties with enough momentum to capture the 155 seats required to control the House of Commons?

With the 10th anniversary of the last federal majority victory coming up in a few months, those two questions are increasingly being asked in public forums and in the partisan backrooms of Parliament Hill (although not at next weekend's Liberal thinkers' conference.)

But there are not many shortcuts to a governing majority.

Together the NDP and the Bloc Québécois capture about one in four votes. Under the current leaders, their combined support has rarely gone under 20 per cent.

If Jack Layton or Gilles Duceppe retired, their respective parties might take a hit in the following campaign.

But there is no lack of able (bilingual) aspirants for the NDP leadership. In the absence of other factors – such as a backlash against a provincial NDP government in one or more major provinces – the core New Democrat vote would likely hold throughout a leadership transition.

While Duceppe's caucus is star-challenged, its Parti Québécois partner has a number of up-and-comers who could find the prospect of leading a party in Parliament more alluring than waiting for an elusive cabinet seat in Quebec's National Assembly.

While leaders matter, it is dangerous to overestimate their contribution to a party's success. For the record, the difference between the Bloc's share of the Quebec vote score after Duceppe's first accident-prone campaign in 1997 and the results of the last election amounts to a measly two-tenths of a percentage point

If the wheels fell off Michael Ignatieff's campaign bus in the next campaign, the Conservatives might reap enough votes to reach their coveted majority. But in the last election the Liberals ran under a leader who had difficulty communicating his message effectively in English and whose main platform staple was an unpopular tax and still the Conservatives could not secure a majority. How much worse can the Liberal campaign be next time?

A big scandal involving the Conservatives would almost certainly bring about a change in government. But as with the sponsorship scandal in 2006, there is no guarantee the substitute government would hold a majority.

All the above scenarios have one feature in common. They rest on a circumstantial change in the fundamentals of the federal scene. In the same fashion the Chrétien majorities were the product of the once-in-a-national-lifetime combination of a divided right and an Ontario backlash against the NDP.

A more structural approach to bringing back majority rule to the federal scene would involve a reorganization of the federalist forces that are to the left of the Conservatives on the political spectrum.

But many Liberals fear a rapprochement with the NDP would only drive more votes to the Conservatives and enable Stephen Harper to own the centre. And more than a few New Democrats fear their voices would be drowned in the mix of an arrangement with the Liberals.

In comparison to a full-fledged merger, an electoral coalition would mitigate those risks but both require an amount of political will that is so far not in evidence within either party.

It was the fear of a Liberal sweep under Paul Martin and not the strategic genius of Stephen Harper or Peter MacKay that drove their two parties into each other's arms in 2003.

By all indications the Liberals and the NDP are not – at this point – desperate enough to think out of the box of their long-standing adversarial relationship. Until they do, federal majority governments stand to be the exception rather than the rule.

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Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.