As we head into a new political season it looks depressingly like the old: a standoff between the malignant minority government of Stephen Harper, and the seriously diminished Liberal Party and its hapless leader Michael Ignatieff.

Both these parties and their leaders are so off the mark in terms of what Canadians want and need that they can't even break through the 30 per cent support mark. Harper seems to have written off Quebec -- a typically petulant response to that province's stubborn attraction to social democracy. The Liberals have lost their ability to connect with Quebec as well, virtually guaranteeing that the Bloc Quebecois will continue to dominate that province and make a majority federal government almost impossible.

Is the world, including Canada, headed for the third Great Depression, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues? Watching the results of the Toronto G8/G20 meetings was like hearing news that a giant comet is heading for earth and we are just waiting for impact. Those meetings of the world's largest and/or growing economies committed governments to massive deficit reduction in spite of the real concern that we are facing a the possibility of a so-called "double-dip" recession. That possibility is now a certainty.

It is too often the case that history highlights important developments that current affairs seem to miss. That unfortunately seems to be the case with what will certainly be recorded as one of the most shameful moral failures of the Quebec labour movement in its history. I am speaking of its blind support for the asbestos industry in that province, support that contradicts almost every important tenet of trade unionism. Asbestos kills more people
worldwide than any other industrial material by far. And that includes Quebec where 55 per cent of all worker fatalities in 2009 were caused by asbestos.

Where are the leaders? It's a question I hear from people more and more.

People are looking for inspiration, hope, some sense that someone at least has some ideas of where the country should go -- not go this afternoon or tomorrow or next week but in the next 20 or 50 years.

Someone who is at least partly a visionary and not just a strategist and tactician. Canadians, I think, are desperately looking for someone who can demonstrate that they have done some serious and thoughtful thinking about what kind of country we want to build.

But political leadership of that kind seems to be a thing of the past. They don't make Tommy Douglases anymore or even Pierre Trudeaus. Why?

Governing as business

Can the opposition parties, primarily the NDP and the Liberals, actually get their act together and save the country from more destruction by the Harper Conservatives? There is evidence that there is at least some talking behind the scenes about the formation of a coalition government. Widely reported remarks by Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert suggest that Jean Chrétien and Ed Broadbent are talking. Bob Rae blogged last week on the 25th anniversary of the Ontario NDP/Liberal coalition government he was part of and ridiculed the Conservatives fear-mongering about the renewed "coalition threat." Reports that members of the Liberal caucus are eager for such a move are also being strategically leaked to the media.