That is more likely if the NDP chooses Thomas Mulcair as its new leader.
There is little doubt who the NDP would choose for its own presidential ticket.
Mr Mulcair's elevation to the leadership shores up the NDP's novel base in Quebec.
Mr Ignatieff tacked to the left, seeking to match the NDP's promises of federal largesse.
NDP's support in the polls to sink to 15%, against 47% for the opposition Liberals.
The NDP was born in 1961 as an uneasy alliance of prairie populists and urban trade unionists.
Yet on Monday the three leaders wrote to the governor-general offering to form a Liberal-NDP coalition government.
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The NDP's old guard will also resist Mr Mulcair's desire to move the party closer to the centre.
Having switched to the federal NDP, in 2008 he won the party's first general election seat in Quebec.
NDP, under an energetic but garrulous new leader, Jack Layton, had hopes of a breakthrough in this election.
About 18 million players have been sold in the last five years, according to research by the NDP Group.
As the NDP's sole Quebec MP prior to the election, he is less unknown than many of his colleagues.
The next is to ensure that it is the NDP that profits from any disillusion with the Conservative government.
Securing the backing of the NDP, which doubled its vote from the 2000 election, would be relatively straightforward, if expensive.
That should be reason enough for the next Liberal leader to hesitate before heeding calls to merge with the NDP.
Then again, the NDP surge may yet help the Conservatives by splitting the opposition vote more evenly (see article).
But it will be what the NDP does next that determines when, and above all how, Mr Harper's dominance might end.
As for the Liberals, their interim leader, Bob Rae, is a former NDP premier of Ontario and is sympathetic to a coalition.
Egypt has some 15 legal opposition parties, but most are weightless or thoroughly co-opted by Mr Mubarak's crushingly dominant National Democratic Party (NDP).
The NDP, for instance, has its roots in Nasser's single-party socialist state, but its current leaders are business moguls, lawyers and local strongmen.
NDP, under Mr Clark, its then-new leader, campaigned for re-election in May 1996 crowing that it had wiped out the province's budget deficit.
The NDP argued that adversaries were unlikely to pose the kind of conventional threat for which the BUR and QDR force postures had been primarily designed.
But he is also seen as a staunch Mubarak loyalist, suggesting that he has no ambition for the job, and he lacks links to the NDP.
The NDP's inexperienced interim leader, Nycole Turmel, was trumped in the Commons by Bob Rae, her Liberal counterpart (who was once the NDP premier of Ontario).
Following his father's death later that year, Mr Odinga changed parties to launch his National Development Party (NDP), which he used to run for president and MP.
Mr Ignatieff did not help himself by seeming to try to have it both ways on whether the Liberals might forge a post-electoral coalition with the NDP.
My candidacy was therefore perverse but in Canada the NDP was the closest they could come to ideological purity and so they always campaigned for their local candidate.
Having managed to win only one seat in Quebec at the 2008 election, this year the NDP won 59 (of a total of 75) in the French-speaking province.
But the superior financial capability and patron-client network of the former ruling party NDP, especially in the Nile Delta, and covert support from the military brass played a big role.
Jack Layton, the NDP's leader, promised to make French the language of work in federal institutions in the province and to require justices of Canada's Supreme Court to be bilingual.
ECONOMIST: A more confident Quebec has other things to think about
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