Not only should the Alliance not get too worried if they can’t merge with the Tories, I think they should actively oppose the idea.

The old PC party under Mulroney (and, for that matter, Clark, Stanfield, and possibly earlier leaders as well) was a hybrid of Western small-c conservatives and Eastern regionals: the Quebec nationalists and Atlantic local power-brokers. The Liberals had their own coalition (Ontario-centric Loyalists, Quebec rouges, other Atlantic local power-brokers, and minority blocs). The NDP (big-s Socialists and western farm voters) was and is a much tighter band.

The Liberals make their disparate coalition work by using their keen political intelligence. The Grits may be corrupt and petty, but they are electoral geniuses: balance each group’s rewards, and never (or rarely) give any one group too much of a reward over another. The Tories under Mulroney made this work for only the first few years of his 1980′s tenure… and then caved in utterly to Quebec nationalists and (to a far lesser extent) Atlantic power-brokers. Western conservatives, who, like NDP socialists, are to a large degree ideologically motivated, felt this betrayal very deeply: the man they elected was treating them (almost) as badly as Trudeau. CF-18 contracts? Meech Lake? Hell, with Tories like these, who needs Liberals?

So Mulroney fractured his own coalition: western small-c’s into the Reform party, Quebec nationalists to the Bloc, and the Atlantic power-brokers to what was left of the PC’s. There are remnants of other groups (I think Ric Borotsik is a group unto himself), but that is where the divisions lie. Everybody talks about “uniting the right”, but the right is already mostly united, within the Alliance. The PC’s are no more right than the Liberals are.

Given that they are not ideological allies, is there any practical (read: electoral) advantage for the Alliance in merging with the PC’s? In a word, no. The PC vote in the Atlantic and Quebec is going to go almost entirely to Martin in the next election, and likely the same thing in Ontario. Martin will win a bigger electoral margin than Mulroney in 1984: I’ll bet a U.S. dollar against anyone who says different.

The Alliance should therefore not fear going into the next election without a Tory partner. They will lose anyway, so what’s the advantage in cuddling up to a bunch of unreconstructed Quebec nationalists and Atlantic welfare-statists? Let the Martin juggernaut finish off the Tories once and for all, and see what happens after that. Maybe Harper can forge a new coalition: western small-c’s, Ontarians fed up with socialist Grits at both federal and provincial levels, and a handful of Atlantic Canadians. Quebec is a write-off for any conservative party, for at least a generation; but seeing as it would be a write-off for the PC’s as well, this is no big loss to the Alliance.

At least by refusing a merger, the Alliance can lose honourably. How much worse to lose with a watered-down platform designed to appeal to the vanishing Tory voter!

The only people who really benefit from a merger would be the PC’s, because it would allow them to ride out the Martin wave on the backs of ideological conservatives in the west. The fact that they won’t participate in a merger is proof positive that the Tories just don’t have the brains to be worthy partners for the Alliance.

Au revoir, Peter Mackay. See you, Elsie. Too bad you can’t stay…