As predicted

Long before the Libs made their choice to keep propping up the Harper government, Paul Wells noted that the Cons weren't about to let the concept of a coalition go away even if Michael Ignatieff did try to distance himself from the one actually agreed to last year. And in yesterday's reporting on Omar Khadr, we saw the first hints as to how Con-friendly media will keep the Cons' talking points front and centre.

Here's Kelly McParland introducing the opposition leaders' joint letter regarding Khadr:

The little-loved coalition has revived itself in support of Omar Khadr, the Canadian held at Guantanamo Bay.

And from Don Martin:

That vilified coalition of the three opposition parties staged a family reunion of sorts yesterday, demanding U. S. President Barack Obama immediately free Canadian Omar Khadr from his six-year imprisonment in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

The Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc Quebecois party leaders all put their signatures to paper, regrouping to argue their position as the majority of MPs in the House of Commons.

Now, it's worth noting that the attempt to link opposition cooperation to a coalition has no basis in reality. The same three parties worked together on an issue-by-issue basis in the last Parliament without the slightest intention to form a coalition government, and the possibility of a coalition forming is no less remote today.

(Not to mention of course that the Bloc was never to be part of a coalition government, which further highlights the lack of any connection between the proposed coalition and the current opposition cooperation. But that fact already seems to have been edited out of the history books.)

It does seem clear though that regardless of the accuracy or lack thereof, at least some portions of the media will see reason to write about a "little-loved", "vilified" coalition every time the opposition parties so much as agree on a lunch order. And that will pose some interesting choices for the Libs and the NDP.

Having passed up the opportunity to shift the focus from the theoretical possibility of a coalition to the reality, the Libs will now face an entirely unpalatable choice of main options.

On the one hand, they can choose to play dead in Parliament once again so as to avoid a constant association between themselves and the idea of coalition which they apparently see as poisoned. But that of course involves not only giving the Harper government both exactly what it wants politically, but also willingly taking on the Dion brand of ineffective opposition.

On the other hand, they can take up the task of defending the concept of coalition in principle in order to justify any steps they might take to actually oppose the Cons. But that many only raise all the more questions about why they didn't follow through in practice - particularly as Canadians continue to suffer from ineffective Con government.

Either way, the Libs figure to spend an awful lot of time trying to explain their own choices rather than being able to focus all that clearly on the Cons. And that only figures to help let Harper off the hook for his own failures.

Meanwhile, the NDP will face a challenging dilemma as well. Having spent the better part of the last two months spreading the word about a multi-party solution while mostly ignoring direct attacks, it now has plenty of work to do in trying to restore Jack Layton's public impressions to their usual levels. And for the moment, it looks to be trying to put the focus back on its effective work in Parliament in order to turn the page on the events of the last couple of months.

But if the Cons and their media allies aren't about to let talk of a coalition die down, then the NDP's most obvious means to turn that into a plus is to appeal to the broader pool of coalition-friendly voters by playing up its own role in creating an alternative to Harper (and the Libs' weakness in not following through). Which may make for a choice between the relatively safe route of trying to move back to the branding the NDP has set up over the last few election cycles, or an all-or-nothing push to try to unite the left under the NDP's tent.

Whatever happens, there doesn't seem to be much reason to doubt that the now-defunct coalition will continue to affect the opposition parties' choices going forward. And it's probably not too early to suggest that both the Libs and the NDP would be better off if Ignatieff had recognized that reality before he decided to leave the Cons in power.