Tories and Alliance Complete the mating dance

If politics makes for strange bedfellows, the political bedroom just got a little more crowded with the announcement of an agreement in principle between Canada's oldest political party and the protesting reformers that sprung from its loins.

In a display of chumminess not seen since, well, ever, Tory leader Peter MacKay and Alliance leader Stephen Harper gave their blessings to the shotgun re-marriage of their two parties. With their tacit agreement on unification, the bureaucratic details of the transition to merge conservatism begins, culminating in a ratification vote by both parties on December 12.

With the shake of a hand, MacKay and Harper have achieved what political pundits have long called for: unification of the right.

Since the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party in the 1993 federal election - in large part due to the splinter-group Reform Party - so called small 'c' conservative commentators have sought a means to bury the hatchet and form a unified front to challenge the apparently unbeatable governing Liberals.

The theory goes, since in numerous ridings the combined Tory-Alliance vote outnumbered the winning Liberal candidate's vote, it stands to reason that had only one conservative candidate run, the riding would not have gone to the Liberals.

If only it were that simple.

The problem with that theory is it simply isn't true: the conservative vote hasn't largely been split across the country; it has largely disappeared. A closer look at election votes shows that only a relatively small number of ridings were actually afflicted with the right wing vote-splitting malaise. Indeed, in many ridings where the conservative vote was significant, it was one or the other of the two parties that captured a significant bundle of the votes.

What few are mentioning - especially among the conservative crowd themselves - is the rather large leap in logic in the assumption that voters who found neither of the two right leaning parties palatable will suddenly be drawn to a combined form of the two undrawables.

And whom do many tout as the conservative messiah to lead the new organization from the electoral wilderness? Former Ontario Premier Mike Harris is one of the first names to emit from the salivating blue lips on the right of the spectrum.

This is the same Mike Harris whose Tory Party in Ontario was just soundly defeated in that province's election, who quit in the middle of his second mandate, whose party was floundering on a sinking economic ship and found itself mired in controversy when its budget cutbacks were followed by seven deaths in Walkerton in the tainted water scandal.

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