I don't think Iggy will want to play second fiddle to Smiling Jack...
Definitely not, but that's not really up to him, depends on the makeup of the House in the first instance, and in the second, on the Governor-General.
Imagine this scenario, for instance: Conservatives get a weak minority position, around 120 seats say, Liberals and NDP get something in the range of 80-90 seats each, and so together outnumber them and have a majority. Harper will almost certainly meet the House and try to gain its confidence, and might succeed for a while, but that'd be a very unstable situation and his government will almost certainly fall fairly quickly. Then the G-G could ask either Ignatieff or Layton to try to form a government, and if Layton has more supporters in the House than Ignatieff he's pretty much bound to ask Layton. Harper could not enter into any kind of formal agreement with Liberals or New Democrats without fatally wounding himself, that'd be one of those coalitions he's spent the whole campaign warning us about. Nobody wants to be allied with the Bloc heads either, that's not shooting yourself in the foot, that's a gut shot. Liberals and New Democrats are the only possible alliance, and it seems worth pointing out again that some of our most productive federal governments have been just such an alliance.
