Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau have finally found one big thing on which they agree — neither one would prop up a Conservative minority government after the Oct. 19 election.

So if the leaders of the NDP and the Liberals aren’t going to negotiate with Stephen Harper, as they have now publicly declared, would they be able to negotiate with each other?

That’s going to be a big question if no party wins a clear majority in three weeks.

What some people might have forgotten, however, is that the current NDP and Liberal campaigns are being led by two women who have sat across from each other at a negotiating table before — working out the terms of a proposed Liberal-NDP coalition government in 2008.

If the Oct. 19 vote does force the New Democrats and Liberals to hammer out some kind of deal, the two women now at the top of both parties’ election campaign organizations will likely be experiencing a bit of déjà vu.

Immediately after the 2008 election, Anne McGrath was working in leader Jack Layton’s office and Katie Telford was working for Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. Both were key members of the small team that worked out the details of a deal to unseat Harper and replace the Conservatives with a coalition government of Liberals and New Democrats.

Telford and McGrath were featured in profiles that ran earlier this week in the Star. As those profiles show, the two are very similar in style and approach. They’re both low-key and practical. While other backroom advisers are focused on the “air” game (the polls, the media and communication strategy), Telford and McGrath keep their eyes on the ground game — the riding battles, the network of volunteers and campaign resources.

Most important, neither one is fond of drama. So while things could get intense after a close election result, McGrath and Telford would be the calm, cool presences for their teams in any future negotiating session.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, both found their way into their current, high-ranking positions in the parties with a background in high-stakes negotiations. McGrath came to the NDP after working with the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Telford earned her negotiating stripes in her late 20s, when working as chief of staff to Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy and in charge of hammering out a new, four-year deal with teachers unions and school boards.

Telford enjoyed the experience so much that when she left Queen’s Park, she enrolled in a master’s program in industrial relations and human resources — which she put on pause while trying to get Justin Trudeau elected as prime minister.

So can we get any clues from their past dealings on how they would negotiate in future? Though neither woman figures prominently in Brian Topp’s book on the 2008 coalition deal, How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot, they do surface at interesting times.

In the 2008 negotiations, it was Telford’s job to deliver some bad news to the New Democrats: Liberals weren’t going to go along with any plan that would give cabinet seats to the NDP in a coalition deal.

“The Liberals, she announced, were now prepared to negotiate an accord with us, not a coalition,” Topp wrote. He calls the moment one in which “the anvil had dropped.”

McGrath wasn’t in the room for that announcement by Telford, but she was immediately on her BlackBerry, looking for a lever to keep the negotiations going. She tracked down former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who had been conferring with former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien. She relayed the word back that the Liberals would probably be talked into accepting a handful of cabinet seats for the NDP.

The interesting similarity there is that both Telford and McGrath saw their places then as voices for the team, or the network — not for themselves. There’s probably a clue in there as to how they came to be seen as skilled negotiators.

For all the coincidence, small or large, in having some of the same people doing future NDP-Liberal negotiating, it seems clear that any coalition talks in 2015 would be a lot different than the ones that took place in 2008.

While the Conservatives and the public were caught off guard by the 2008 deal, that wouldn’t be the case today. Polls have even shown that a good number of Canadians would be pleased to see a Liberal-NDP deal to govern.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

It’s also true that the rivalry between Mulcair and Trudeau is far more fierce than the rivalry between Layton and Dion.

That’s why, though, it could prove significant after Oct. 19 that the Liberal and NDP campaigns are being led by calm, no-drama women who have seen this movie before.

Read more about: