You're seeing it directly through your partisan mindset, JimLad (as are we all). It's been frustrating the hell out of a majority of Canadians for some time now that our multi-party system results in about 37% of the (voting) public winning each election and thereby running the country as if they were a majority (of the voters), which they are not.

Do you recall when the conservatives (small "c") in this country were having their vote split between 2 parties: the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party? Do you?

Conservatives (small c again) couldn't win a federal election to save their lives as long as their vote was split between 2 conservative parties.

You didn't enjoy that, did you? It guaranteed a Liberal Party victory in every election. So the inevitable eventually happened and the two conservative parties merged into one out of mutual self-interest and a desire to win an election.

Now you have the opposite situation, where the NDP and the Liberals, and the Greens are splitting all the non-Conservative votes between themselves and mutually cutting each other's throats by so doing.

The only thing they CAN do under these circumstances is what the conservatives did....they must now join together in some fashion...either by forming a new single party...or by forming a coalition of parties.

Given their respective utter determination to maintain their separate identities, it has to be a coalition.

The natural voting trend in this country, JimLad, is for about 40% of the country to support a conservative social philosophy and for about 60% of it to support a liberal social philosophy. That means that Canadian conservatives are always going to be out in the cold UNLESS the liberals split their votes between 2 or more parties.....(or unless the Liberal Party itself is in office so long and gets so damned arrogant that the public finally turns on them in disgust....which is what used to always happen eventually in the old days.)

No wonder the notion of this coalition bothers you... ;-) It's not because it's undemocratic. It's not because it's unfair. It's because it would cause your guys to lose power. Period. You are moved by your partisan loyalties and your social philosophy (as are we all).