MONTREAL

Former prime minister Jean Chrétien feels a Liberal/NDP coalition is a concept worth exploring. “If it’s doable, let’s do it” he told CBC television last week. Former NDP premier Roy Romanow agrees. In an interview on the same network this week, he said the two parties should at least be “bold” enough to discuss the notion.

In his own days as a minority premier in Saskatchewan, Romanow experimented with a governing coalition and found it a constructive experience. In a recent op-ed piece, Bob Rae – who as an Ontario NDP leader signed on to a pact that allowed David Peterson’s minority Liberals to govern the province from 1985 to 1987 – used the 25th anniversary of the event to write it up as a worthwhile exercise.

Among the three of them, Rae, Chrétien and Romanow command a larger audience than current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

That may explain why, despite efforts on the part of Ignatieff and his palace guard, the idea of coalition-building will not go away.

So far, attempts to put a lid on such talk have resulted in only one outcome and that has been to highlight Ignatieff’s isolation from some of the more dynamic forces within his own party.

There is as much private and public speculation about an eventual rapprochement between the Liberals and the NDP as ever, but increasingly it revolves around schemes that would see Ignatieff out of the picture.

And while many of the Liberals who look favourably on new arrangements between their party and the NDP are resigned to having Ignatieff first run a campaign on his own terms, their ranks have been shrinking.

Part of Ignatieff’s problem is that the rationale for shutting down talk of a coalition seems based on little else than fear of Conservative spin. Looking at the party’s less-than-stellar standing in the polls, it is hard to see what he has left to lose by venturing out of the box.

For months now, the Liberals have been stuck within the margin of error of their dismal 2008 election score in the public opinion polls.

After a year as leader, Ignatieff has yet to either breathe down the neck of the first-place Conservatives or, short of that, make a dent in NDP and Bloc Québécois support.

The Liberal leader’s advocates argue that Chrétien went into the 1993 campaign very much as the underdog. And that he faced more formidable third-party leaders in the shape of Preston Manning and Lucien Bouchard than Ignatieff will when he does cross swords with Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe.

But the reality is that Chrétien did not have to beat Manning and Bouchard to have a shot at winning government. In fact, in his first campaign, he beat neither of them. They turned out to be objective allies in the mathematical battle to drive the Tories out of office and their respective successes helped seal the Liberal majority victory.

If Ignatieff is to be compared to any of the leaders running in 1993, it would be Kim Campbell, a leader selected because she represented a clean break with the unpopular recent Tory past but who simply could not sustain a three-pronged attack at the hands of three more seasoned opponents.

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As post-1993 events demonstrated, leadership was not the main Tory problem. In Campbell’s wake, Jean Charest and Joe Clark also failed to steer the Progressive Conservative ship out of the backwaters of opposition. It had simply lost too many sails to make it to the open sea on its own wind and the Liberals today are increasingly in the same predicament.

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