IN THE WAKE OF the party's disastrous showing in last week's election, senior members of the federal Liberal Party are said to be pushing hard to have Stéphane Dion resign as leader and convert a party leadership review next May into a leadership contest.

However, anyone who looked closely at the election outcome and the factors that led to the Liberals losing 22 seats ought to conclude that Canada's "natural governing party" needs to do much more than craft better policies and find a more charismatic leader.

A compilation of the results by Elections Canada shows that despite Mr. Dion's insistence on pushing the party's Green Shift and its new tax on carbon, more than 3.6 million of the 13.8 million Canadians who cast ballots voted for Liberal candidates, compared with 5.2 million who voted Conservative.

More importantly, 2.5 million voters opted for the New Democrats, whose platform was remarkably similar to the Liberals', albeit minus any promise of a carbon tax per se (merely a commitment to make highly profitable corporations pay more, not less, taxes).

As we see it, what the federal Liberals need to do, and quickly, is initiate merger talks with the NDP with an eye to converting the May meeting in Vancouver into the founding convention of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP?), at which the list of leadership candidates could include both Mr. Dion and NDP Leader Jack Layton as well as others such as Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff, Frank McKenna and Gerard Kennedy, not to mention any of the prominent female MPs in both parties.

Our analysis of the election outcome has led to deep suspicion that while a lot of those who had supported the Liberals in past elections voted for NDP or Green candidates, a lot more chose simply to stay at home. (If any significant number had switched to the Conservatives, the winners' popular vote would have risen in actual numbers as well as a percentage of the total vote.)

To us, it's truly amazing that the Liberals and New Democrats seem to have learned nothing from the successful merger of the moderate Progressive Conservative and farright Reform/Canadian Alliance party.

There, although the effect of the merger was to create a broadly based party dominated at the top by neoconservatives, there has been precious little evidence of any significant loss of "Red Tories" aside, perhaps, from their disinclination to become candidates.

When one considers the fact that the 'neocons' and moderate conservatives are managing to work together under the single Conservative Party of Canada label, is there any reason to believe that the same wouldn't happen in the event of a Liberal-NDP merger? We think not.

One needn't spend much time reflecting on the possible consequences of the merger to come up with these discoveries:

• Even without the synergistic benefits from the merger, the votes cast for the two parties in last week's pathetic turnout (under 60 per cent of those eligible) totalled about 6.1 million, compared with the Tories' 5.2 million — probably more than enough to produce a majority government.

• In Quebec, the merged party would have economic policies so close to those of the Bloc Québécois that they would likely attract a lot of those who voted for Bloc candidates, particularly if the electorate did not associate the new party with the sponsorship scandal.

• Apart from the successful "unite the right" movement in Canada, there are other parties in the Anglo Saxon world that are amalgams. In the United States, the Republicans are an effective merger of moderate and social conservatives, and the Democrats enjoy the support of trade unions in the North and southerners who are every bit as conservative as the Republicans.

And as we see it, the timing is critical. With there being little or no doubt that Canada is heading into a serious recession, the Harper Conservatives are going to face a lot of economic challenges between now and the next election, whenever it occurs.

But only if the centre-left forces can speak with a single voice can their calls for change strike a responsive chord with the uncommitted voter (in our view the vast majority).

Just imagine an election in 2011 at which the Liberals and NDP again produced similar platforms, and the result was that each party got a bigger share of the total vote, the Liberals garnering 30 per cent, the NDP 23 per cent and the Bloc stayed at 10 per cent.

Were that to happen, the Conservatives could still get 37 per cent of the vote and continue in power, albeit with a smaller minority.

In contrast, a merged centre-left party would almost certainly get more than 53 per cent and the Bloc less than 10 per cent. The only question left would be how large the new party's majority would be.

For those who wonder why there has been so little talk of such a merger, we can see several reasons, none of which continues to be valid.

One obviously was the Liberals' success in holding office in a three-party era, during which the NDP was a ginger group that never had a hope of governing federally.

But another was the fact that the NDP in its early years was just as socialist as its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). However, of the years, most of the things the NDP campaigned for (notably universal medicare) and a national day care program were either attained or co-opted into the Liberals' platforms.

Today, the NDP, both as a party and its supporters, are appropriately dubbed "Liberals in a hurry" and could become the conscience of the new party.