WITHOUT A DOUBT, most Canadians don't want another federal election, yet it seems fairly certain not only that they're going to have one but that the result will be similar to that achieved by the last three trots to the polls — a minority government.

For entirely different reasons, both the governing Conservatives and the opposition Liberals seem to want an election, and until Monday both the New Democrats and Bloc Québecois seemed to be as determined as the Liberals to bring the government down in a confidence vote.

The Conservatives want one now because Prime Minister Stephen Harper thinks he knows how to garner a majority this time after coming so close to achieving one last year.

His plan became fairly obvious last week with the production of a furtively recorded speech the Prime Minister gave to Tory faithful in Sault Ste. Marie. In it, he pitched for a majority government to teach the opposition parties a lesson should they, as expected, combine to vote down the government.

If the Liberals gained enough seats to return to power with the support of "the socialists and separatists," he said, "imagine how many left-wing ideologues they would be putting in the courts, federal institutions, agencies, the Senate. I should say, how many more they would be putting in."

He went on to suggest that a Liberal government would also create a "bloated bureaucracy" to run a national daycare program, introduce a carbon tax and raise other taxes, be "soft on crime" and provide support for "leftwing fringe groups" that mount court challenges.

As might have been expected, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff responded by restating his position against entering any coalition with the NDP, while leaving the door open to co-operation with the other parties.

Although he didn't outline how he'd work with the NDP and/or the Bloc, he noted there were "many models" of minority governments, and Canada had minority governments in the past "that were among the most productive in the history of our country — Mr. Trudeau's government, Mr. Pearson's government.

"They were not coalition governments," he said. "They worked wonderfully well. They produced great results for Canadians."

The Liberal leader promised only to present voters "with a very clear alternative" to the Conservatives, a "moderate government of the centre."

Perhaps. However, as matters stand it's much more likely that a 37-day election campaign this fall would result in few changes in terms of overall popularity, with the Conservatives likely to lose seats in Quebec and gain a few elsewhere, emerging with more seats but about the same share of the popular vote as the Liberals.

As for the other parties, there's likely to be just as little change, with the New Democrats and Bloc keeping the seats they now have and the Green Party continuing to command nearly one vote in 10 but failing to win a single seat among the 308 up for grabs.

As for the Prime Minister's remark about "left wing ideologues," we were left searching for a good definition of the term. Not finding it in any printed dictionary, we turned to the Net and with help from Google came up with two from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Tracing the term to the French idéologue, it offered: 1. an impractical idealist; theorist; 2. an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.

Well, there's no doubt that we once did indeed have left-wing politicians who fit that description, many of them card-carrying members of the Communist Party of Canada.

But in more recent years we have witnessed NDP governments in Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and now Nova Scotia, most of which governed their provinces in much the same way Liberal regimes had. And the Harper speech came in the same month he had picked Manitoba's former NDP premier, Gary Doer, to succeed Michael Wilson as Canada's ambassador to the United States.

As we see it, the true "ideologues" in Canada are more often on the right, not left, side of the political spectrum.

All this leaves us wondering what would happen if Mr. Ignatieff and NDP Leader Jack Layton were merely to reach an accommodation under which their parties would field candidates only in ridings which each had a chance of winning, while allowing local riding associations to pick a single candidate who would be endorsed by both parties.

Unprecedented as such an arrangement would be, it would greatly increase the likelihood that the two parties' representation in the House of Commons would come close to the roughly 50 per cent combined popular support they currently enjoy.

It might also be a first step toward Canada having something approaching a two-party system similar to that in the United States, with both the Liberals and Conservatives having broadly based memberships with a blending of "centrists" and "wingers."