If Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and the NDP's Jack Layton are searching for a route to power in an electorally divided nation dominated by a seat-rich rival party — one positioned on the far side of the political spectrum — they might look to a road map produced in 1996 by none other than future Conservative leader and prime minister Stephen Harper.

And what was the best solution for overcoming the "benign dictatorship" of what Harper, at the time, called the "one-party-plus" rule of the Jean Chretien-led Liberals? It was a "coalition" or working alliance of opposition parties — possibly backed by the Bloc Quebecois.

Harper's detailed and visionary plan to end the crippling effect of vote-splitting among centre-right parties — a grim reality now faced by Canada's centre-left — was published in the now-defunct Next City Magazine.

And many of the ideas being tossed around today by frustrated supporters of the Liberal, NDP and Green parties are all there under Harper's byline: party amalgamations, co-operative election strategies, parliamentary alliances and — yes — coalition governments propped up by Quebec separatists.

The essay was penned 15 years ago by Harper and his frequent collaborator on political writings at the time, University of Calgary historian and political scientist Tom Flanagan. Flanagan went on to become a key strategist in Harper's rise to power as his chief of staff and Conservative campaign manager, later writing about the experience in his 2007 book Harper's Team.

But in 1996, the national political landscape looked rather bleak to Harper and Flanagan as they surveyed a weak and fragmented conservative movement with little hope of stopping a second Liberal majority in the 1997 election.

Harper, in fact, who served as a Reform MP from 1993 to 1997, was on the verge of leaving elected politics to become head of the National Citizens' Coalition lobby group.

And when he and Flanagan contemplated conservatism's long-range prospects in their essay — titled "Our Benign Dictatorship" — they saw in recent Canadian history not the operation of the commonly understood two-party-plus system (Liberal and Conservative, with NDP as the "plus"), but a "one-party-plus" system in which Liberals almost always govern, except for brief interruptions when Conservatives manage to cobble together a fragile coalition of western populists, the traditional Tories of central and Eastern Canada and Quebec nationalists.

At the time, with Reform and the former Progressive Conservative party dividing the centre-right vote and allowing Chretien's Liberals the easy election victories of a virtual "hegemony," Harper and Flanagan predicted an ongoing "war of attrition" between conservative parties with no real hope of unification — a prediction that was proven wrong in 2004 when Harper took charge of a united right as leader of the new Conservative Party of Canada.

But back in 1996, still stuck on the outside of power looking in, the authors of "Our Benign Dictatorship" saw a reformed electoral system — perhaps proportional representation — as one possible solution, so that a relatively strong popular vote for the two main conservative parties could at least translate into a greater seat total in Parliament.