Canadians spend much time debating which party would make the best government. Perhaps, in this era of minority parliaments, we should focus equally on who would do the best job of acting as official opposition.

Because it seems that Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals certainly aren’t up to the job.

The latest example of Liberal ineffectiveness is the party’s contradictory approach to a massive omnibus bill working its way through the Commons.

Bill C-9 is ostensibly designed to implement federal budget measures, including some popular tax changes, approved back in March.

But it goes much farther than anything explicitly detailed in that budget and, if passed, would give Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government new authority on a wide variety of fronts.

One of its more stunning proposals — particularly in light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster — would exempt a wide range of commercial projects from rules designed to protect the environment.

Another would give cabinet the right to sell off the country’s premier nuclear corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada, without parliamentary approval.

All three opposition parties say that to package so many disparate things in one bill is an outrageous abuse.

But the Liberals, desperate to avoid an election they believe they can’t yet win, are letting the bill move ahead anyway.

Most recently, the Liberals kept one of their MPs away from the Commons finance committee to make sure that Bill C-9 could get through that stage without their having to explicitly support it.

On Tuesday, Liberal MP and finance critic Bob Rae was on CBC Radio suggesting that the unelected Senate might be better positioned than the elected Commons to give Bill C-9 the scrutiny it deserves.

That’s an argument that doesn’t make sense (the unelected Senate is always loath to defeat a Commons money bill). But to be fair to Rae, it’s all he could say given the refusal of Liberal MPs to undertake the job they were elected to fill — that of official opposition.

The essential problem is that the Liberals don’t take the role of opposition seriously. Desperate for power, they are unwilling to do anything to spark an election until they are reasonably sure of winning it.

Yet given the current configuration of political forces in Canada — and their current leader — they cannot be certain of winning more seats than Harper’s Conservatives in the next election.

So they do nothing. They hem; they haw; they occasionally threaten. But in the end they back off, waiting for that elusive better chance.

That may be fine for them. But it’s not for us. The country didn’t elect 77 Liberal MPs so that they could sit on their hands waiting for the moment to regain power. We elected them — and the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats — to rein in a minority Conservative government that most of us don’t trust.

How they accomplish this is up to them. We’ve had plenty of experience with minority parliaments in Canada. In most cases, the official opposition has managed to hold the government to account without surrendering its own long-term political interests.

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But that works only if the opposition takes its job seriously. The Bloc and the NDP do. The Liberals don’t. They focus only on winning the next go-around. They may find, when the go-around occurs, that the country has lost patience with them.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.