It's too bad the Conservatives are really neo-conservatives. And have a legacy of electing mediocrities to lead their party. Harper is completely average in intellect, national and moral sense.. without the wherewithal to extricate himself from the classic economic liberalism that pervades neoconservative principles. I don't think he's a malignant American stooge like Mulroney though, just not very smart.
We need a party that can reassert Canada's economic sovereignty, most prominently in energy and other natural resources, but in manufacturing as well. That takes a plan that rejects the nonsense of the 'Invisible Hand of the Free Market', which simply leaves the field to a predatory, incestuous, global investment organism. A petty ideologue like Harper, making a fool of himself by going around the globe signing Free Trade Agreements with banana republics, will never get us out of our economic and social malaise.
I would class Ignatieff as possessing something of an independent intellect, but his party is now in the grip of post structural dogma, run by radical environmentalists, feminist and homosexual advocates, new age social axioms, and of course like all Liberal Party platforms, is fundamentally Free Trade in orientation, as with the Reciprocity Treaty of Laurier.
Essentially we've been left without a representation for a National System of Political Economy, our only hope to get us out of an economic paradigm that is like a bouncing ball, losing energy everytime is hits ground. The NDP are hopeless.