Angry in the Great White North

It is a truism in military history that generals have the tendency to fight the last war.  It's just human nature.  A plan worked in the past.  Why wouldn't it work again?

Smart commanders learn from the past, but also know that history is linear, not cyclical.  Nothing ever happens the same way twice.  World War I was characterized by defensive actions from fixed locations against an enemy charging from the front.  French forces at the opening of World War II went into their fixed defensive positions along the Maginot Line (which wasn't a single line of defenses like a single trench or the Great Wall of China, by the way) waiting for the Germans to advance against them.  The Germans didn't fight that way the second time, using mobility to their advantage to attack from an entirely different direction (helped by a willingness to invade non-combatant nations), and so the French generals failed in their defense of the republic.

The French generals were fighting the wrong war.

Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are not making that mistake:

Meanwhile, the Tories are very much in campaign mode. Thinking ahead to the next election, party strategists are considering activating the groups they formed last year to oppose the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition. The Canadians who became involved in the anti-coalition protests are not all Conservative supporters; they are simply opposed to a coalition government running the country. They registered their names, addresses and other useful information on Facebook group sites controlled by the Conservatives. This has given the Tories valuable new lists of potential supporters.

The idea is to use them as third-party organizations, which are allowed to spend up to $3,000 in individual ridings and $150,000 nationally. "They could be deployed in Liberal-Conservative or Conservative-NDP swing ridings as third-party groups to criticize candidates who supported the coalition," the Tory insider said.

Michael Ignatieff is not Stephane Dion, and the Liberal Party itself is different now.  A new leader means a new line of attack, and you need to be flexible in your thinking to recognize that.  It sounds like the Conservatives are not fighting an air war this time around (first Gulf War in 1991) but are instead planning a ground fight (second Gulf War in 2003), a classic example of switching strategies to reflect new realities, instead of simply repeating the past.

Michael Ignatieff, on the other hand, has a problem.  He can't rewrite the past.  He did sign the coalition letter that went to the Governor General, and has spoken favourably of the coalition - this will all come back to haunt him.

Add to this the way Danny Williams manhandled the Liberals over the budget vote, and you have an image of a party leader that has, at best, only a partial grip on the party leadership.  To get things done, Michael Ignatieff depends on the consent and support of others whose agendas are different.

With a broken Liberal Party and much reduced Liberal caucus handed to him by Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff will have a lot of work ahead of him to change that image and so blunt this Tory strategy.  That suggests that Michael Ignatieff will hold off on triggering an election, and might explain why this leak was authorized (and we know this leak was likely authorized). 

It'll be interesting to see what shelf life this coalition strategy will have.  Normally I would say it would be measured in months before the Tories would be forced to find a new line of attack against Michael Ignatieff, but it could be extended by the NDP or the Bloc Quebecois if they made the argument that the coalition could be revived under a new Liberal leader, like Bob Rae.

Remember that these third-party organizations are not all Conservatives.  Could part of the Tory strategy be to encourage Liberal and NDP supporters to talk up a revived coalition under Bob Rae, while simultaneously having Conservative supporters warn Canadians of the coalition lurking in the wings?

Oh, that would be so twisted.  But like I said, it's about fighting the next battle, not the last one.