What's the difference between a coalition, an agreement and an accord?

Asking Michael Ignatieff if he’s going to form a coalition with the NDP and Bloc is the wrong question.

Because even if Ignatieff loses the election (as early polls suggest), he doesn’t need a coalition to seize power. He can do what the Liberals and NDP did immediately after the 1985 provincial election in Ontario: Just grab power with an immediate non-confidence vote. No coalition needed, to hell with the voters.

The 1985 Ontario election was won by the Conservatives. They won more seats than any other party — but they still had a minority. Instead of accepting that result, Bob Rae, then leader of the NDP, phoned up David Peterson, the Liberal leader, and made a deal to grab power.

They didn’t make a formal coalition. A coalition is a specific deal where cabinet seats are divided up and more than one party becomes an integral part of the government.

The Liberals and NDP just agreed that, as soon as Ontario’s legislature met, they’d join forces to vote non-confidence in the Conservatives and propose the Liberals should rule with the NDP’s support.

Being lawyers, they called it an accord, not a coalition. But it was a deal. The Liberals promised to implement a series of NDP policies. And in return, the NDP agreed to sink the Conservatives, and keep the Liberals in power for two years.

A coalition? No. Seizing power away from the party that just placed first in a democratic election? Absolutely.

Forcing NDP policies onto the province, just days after Liberal voters thought voting for the Liberal Party meant Liberal policies? But of course.

Technically, there is nothing illegal about opposition parties ganging up on a minority government and replacing it. But mere days after an election, overriding voters for no reason other than to seize power? At the very least that must be called undemocratic. Tricky is another word that comes to mind.

It’s clearly what Ignatieff — with his lieutenant, the same Bob Rae — is plotting to do again. On the first day of the campaign, Ignatieff had a disastrous press scrum where he repeatedly refused to rule out forming a coalition.

Even the left-leaning Toronto Star and CBC weren’t buying Ignatieff’s painful ambiguity on the subject.

So that night the party’s lawyers produced a very carefully crafted document. Ignatieff now swears he “will not enter a coalition with other federalist parties” or “a coalition or formal arrangement with the Bloc Quebecois.”

Do you see the specific, lawyerly wording here? To Ignatieff, there are “coalitions” and there are “formal arrangements” and, by inference, there are informal arrangements. And he did not rule out informal arrangements — or “accords” as the 1985 deal was called.

Oh, and it just so happens the 2008 Stephane Dion, Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton deal — signed by Ignatieff and Rae — was also called an “accord.”

Coalition or no coalition? That’s a lawyer’s trick; it’s a diversion. The real question is whether Ignatieff and the other parties will immediately vote non-confidence in a Tory minority right after an election. What that deal is called is not the issue.

Ignatieff has claimed his love for democracy caused him to force this election campaign. Perhaps that love can move him to disclose whether he will accept another Conservative minority mandate — and what conversations he’s had with the NDP and Bloc about any post-election “accord.”