Okay, Ignatieff (sorry, I just can't bring myself to use "Iggy" - it just doesn't stick in my head) has handed Harper a list of conditions to which Harper must respond in order to avoid triggering an election.
The points themselves are not news, the Liberals have been on these subjects for a long time:
* EI reform.
* How much infrastructure funding is being spent, not just announced.
* What is the plan to dig us out of the deficit?
* What is the plan to deal with the isotope crisis?
In terms of policy, frankly any party right now is hooped. I don't care what their strip is, the demands on them are so far out of the realm of normal that I do not believe any of them have a hope of digging things out from within their current ideological structures. It will require a pragmatic not wedded to any one solution when we go to dig the economy out of the mess we're in, much less the problems we have to deal with in four or five years when the chickens really come home to roost.
What Ignatieff has really done here is hand back to Harper the gun, and told Harper to shoot himself in the head.
Harper, being who he is, will try to find a way to agree to "just enough" to make it difficult for Ignatieff to trigger an election without actually answering the hard questions. This is actually one of the common problems with multiple choice exams - if the student figures out what the game, is, it is no longer difficult to bet the teacher at their own game.
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