This seems perfectly reasonable to me:

Ignatieff willing to lead coalition, but talk of merger with NDP is ‘absurd’

Michael Ignatieff says coalition governments are “perfectly legitimate” and he’d be prepared to lead one if that’s the hand Canadian voters deal him in the next election.

But the Liberal Leader says it would be disrespectful to voters and damaging to his party to try to strike any deals with the NDP before voters have spoken.

In an exclusive interview with The Canadian Press, Mr. Ignatieff dismissed talk of a merger or any sort of election non-compete agreement with the NDP as “absurd.”

As I’ve said before, there’s nothing inherently wrong about coalitions. Say the Bloc collapsed and we get a parliament that looks like this:

CPC 123
Lib 120
NDP 35
BQ 30

Now say the Liberals won the popular vote. Surely then, a Liberal-NDP coalition would make a lot of sense. There’s no point in ruling it out categorically beforehand because, by ruling it out, you’d be robing it its legitimacy.

Hopefully this will end all the coalition and merger talk for a while. Because I’m sure Liberals would rather be talking about the billion dollar G20 price tag than about this.