Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

This is not a drill. Unless it's a drill. But it isn't. Probably.

by Paul Wells on Thursday, August 21, 2008 8:30pm - 0 Comments

So I had a chat today with somebody familiar with the thinking of the Prime Minister, and this person said this business of Stephen Harper preparing to call an election instead of waiting for the opposition is serious.

What follows has been reported by others in recent days, but I kind of needed to hear it myself before I’d believe it. I now believe it.

The prime minister has concluded that governing in the current environment is “like swimming in molasses,” I’m told. (Questions about why this would be the PM’s perception now when it wasn’t, as far as anybody was hearing, his perception the last time Parliament was actually sitting are perfectly valid.)

Stephen Harper has decided there’s no way the opposition parties will allow the government to stay there until October, 2009. So he figures he might as well cut all this short. To make sure his perception is accurate he is seeking meetings with the opposition leaders soon. (“We’re not talking weeks here.”) The goal: to see whether Harper can cobble together some deliverable legislative agenda that gets him to Christmas. Essentially he needs one opposition leader to promise, under mutually acceptable circumstances, to refrain from voting non-confidence.

Short of that, he will decide to ask the Governor General for dissolution and an election. (The fixed-election-date act begins by stating that nothing in the act detracts from the GG’s ability to dissolve Parliament at any moment. Which it would sort of have to, because anything that did try to detract from that ability would be unconstitutional on its face.) My very strong conviction is that, more than two and a half years having elapsed since the last election, the GG would have no basis to deny dissolution and an election.

The political cost of passing a doofus-brained fixed-election act and then abandoning it as soon as the going got a little rough would remain. I have no idea how to estimate that cost.

Once he decided elections were inevitable before Christmas, Harper would be inclined to call the election before the Commons reconvened in September — because, I was told, the opposition would later ask why he bothered to sit the House if he was just going to dissolve it soon after.

So there you have it. Unless one of the opposition leaders pulls a rabbit out of his hat during these meetings with Harper, we would seem to be heading toward an election writ drop within the next few weeks. I would not altogether rule out the idea that Harper would drop the writ before the Sept. 8 by-elections.

I hate election speculation when it detracts from coverage of real things. The odd weak moment aside, I have largely abstained from the last couple of rounds of election hysteria. But I am now planning, and encouraging my colleagues to plan, on the assumption that a general election campaign will begin in September.

Tags: election speculation malgré lui, Election Watch, fixed election dates can break too, Stephen Harper

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Brad

LKO -

Just back from lunch – nice sauteed sole with a chilled glass of chablis perfection on the Quay. It’s a beautiful, day, isn’t it?

Your responses are generally sound. Depressing, but sound.
Lord Kitchener’s Own

Boudica,

You ask, given that in order to force an election the PM would have to blatantly ignore the spirit of his own, highly trumpeted, “fixed election dates” law “Why do it when the political cost is so obvious? The answer I suppose is, are we sure the “political costs” are obvious?

I do think it would be pretty bad for the government to ignore the spirit of a law they trumpeted loudly as a great reform to the functioning of democracy in Canada. It can’t be good to have everyone see that a law you pretended was important is actually completely meaningless hogwash, and that opposition MPs were totally justified in calling the whole process of passing the law “completely duplicitous”.

The question remains however whether being “completely duplicitous” and passing laws that purport to do one thing, while in reality they do nothing of the sort, would actually lead to a “political cost”. I think an argument could be made that Canadians are entirely comfortable with governments that are duplicitous, and who openly and repeatedly tell us that the laws they pass do things that they clearly don’t do. Now true, prior to the current Parliament it had been a while since it was last a CONSERVATIVE government that was lying right to our faces and pretending to do things they weren’t really doing (and pretending NOT to do things they really were, it should be added) so that’s relatively novel, but I’m not sure Canadians are shocked by it, or ready to enact a price for it.

I could have told you years ago that the Tories would be no different from the Liberals once they were in power; that they’d lie right to our faces and not even blink, and that the only difference might be a question of scale, given that it had been a while since the Tories had been in a position to spectacularly fail to live up to our best hopes, so being out of practice, it might take them a while to get used to being in power, and to figure out how to let us down. To me, the fact that they’ve lived up to my expectations and are as disappointing as any other government has been is actually almost more comforting than disappointing. It’s nice to have one’s expectations met, even if you expect the worst.

Or am I just too jaded?

As I said, perhaps blatantly violating the spirit of a law you not only wrote and passed, but trumpeted as a great advance for the nation – thus proving definitively that said law was never anything more than empty, meaningless, constitutionally moot rhetoric – SHOULD entail a political cost at the polls. But I’m not remotely convinced that it will.
de

Why now? Ethics committee, contracting economy promising stagflation, mounting Afghanistan set backs and exhaustive analysis when the 100th soldier dies there, a Green Shift platform which Dion does not possess the linguistic grace to explain to the thicker of English Canadians. Prospects aren’t better in the next year and a half.
boudica

“Prospects aren’t better in the next year and a half.”

But when you are tied in the polls nationally to your competition, does it make sense to begin your campaign by handing them such a loaded gun to use against you?

Or could it be that the CPC really does think that Canadians will believe their parliamentary gridlock nonsense?
Lord Kitchener’s Own

Mark:

Andrew Potter’s post on this is dumb. S.4.1 doesn’t FIX parliamentary lengths, it CAPS them. Hardly the same thing.

Well, in Andrew’s defence, I believe the point he was making was that the statute “fixing election dates” doesn’t fix election dates either. It simply purports to cap them at an earlier point. More importantly, it doesn’t actually even cap them at all, it merely suggests that they should theoretically be capped, while studiously and explicitly pointing out that as merely a federal statute it does nothing to change the constitution, thus making it entirely moot. The important part of Potter’s post is not “the Constitution already fixes election dates” (on which point you could, I suppose, argue that it doesn’t “fix” them, so much as “cap” them – though I think that’s largely a silly and semantically unimportant distinction in this context). The important point of Andrew’s post is that the “fixed election date” statute doesn’t fix election dates. Leave aside whether or not you agree that we all ready HAVE “fixed election dates”. The important point is that the statute purporting to fix election dates, doesn’t.

You state that Byng couldn’t “point to a statute ‘fixing election dates’”, but I’d argue that neither can Jean. Not REALLY. After all, she’d be pointing to a statute who’s first eleven words are “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General. Given that, how is Jean in any different a position than Byng? Parliament could pass a law asking the GG to directly rule over us all for all eternity as an omnipotent God-Queen. If the first subsection of that law stated “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General”, it would be just as meaningless.
T. Thwim

boudica:

The CPC has been characterizing Dion as weak due to his sit-on-hands stance in confidence matters. I wasn’t sure for a while, but it looks like Dion may have judged correctly in assuming that the details of how the conservatives have remained in power are a little too distant for the average, non-political voter (unlike most of us on this blog) to care about.

On the other hand, Dion coming out and saying “Mr. Harper doesn’t control when the election is, I do,” cuts right to the quick of the meme Harper’s been trying to build for the last 2.5 years. And it’s been getting media-play.

One thing Harper likes to be is in control. You see it in everything from his governing style to his relationships with his kids. So having it appear in the public that he’s out of control may in fact simply put a desparate personal need to reclaim that controlling territory. If that means hurting his own party’s chances in the doing, well, that’s the way it goes.

Probably one of the reasons why any governing party really shouldn’t sublimate itself to such complete domination by a single person. Everybody has issues, and if the opposition happens to find one of those, the entire group can suffer.
http://jasoncherniak.com Jason Cherniak

This is exactly why some people (like me) think that supposed electoral reform is a sham. No politician would ever really give up the power to do something that they believe is in the best interests of the country (which means the best interests of getting themselves elected). The next evidence will be when a majority government delays an election because “the people aren’t ready for it” or some such nonsense that involves a recession.
boudica

“One thing Harper likes to be is in control. You see it in everything from his governing style to his relationships with his kids. So having it appear in the public that he’s out of control may in fact simply put a desparate personal need to reclaim that controlling territory. If that means hurting his own party’s chances in the doing, well, that’s the way it goes.”

T. Twhim, I have to agree with that but what doesn’t fit for me is that Harper is many things but stupid isn’t on the list. If Wells and others are to believe, Harper won’t even wait for Parliament to resume before going to the GG to claim gridlock as justification for dissolving Parliament.

To do this would put the CPC on the defensive from the very beginning of the campaign because the Bloc and the LPC will tear into them on that very issue. This is likely to set the tone for the race.

Why take such a risk? Perhaps I’ve overrestimated the man’s intelligence.
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http://cork2toronto.blogspot.com Mark Dowling

While Jean is not tied by the statute, that doesn’t mean she can’t CHOOSE to take it seriously… with that discretion thing.
http://Joe joe palaschuk

Hey guys how about the GG asking the oposition to form the government and dump the Conservatives.
JK

J.Cherniak says….

“This is exactly why some people (like me) think that supposed electoral reform is a sham”

Well then, why did people “like you”(liberals), help pass this law?
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