In the end, Michael Ignatieff had a decision to make. Do words and actions have consequences, or did he return to Canada to deliver empty threats every few months? Apparently it took him some time to pick an answer to that question, but by the time the Liberal caucus gathered in Sudbury this week, Ignatieff had chosen to give his behaviour a little consistency. In so doing he gave Canadian politics, at last, a little drama. And he seems to have put the country on a fast track to a fall election, barely a year after the last one.
“After four years of drift, four years of denial, four years of division and discord—Mr. Harper, your time is up,” Ignatieff told his caucus. “The Liberal party cannot support this government any further. We will hold it to account. We will oppose it in Parliament.”
This could wind up meaning any number of things. It could be a wet firecracker if the NDP or the Bloc Québécois take Ignatieff’s new assertiveness as their cue to reverse a solid trend of voting against the government at every chance. But if they don’t—if every opposition party votes against the government on a money bill or an explicit confidence motion—then sometime soon after the House of Commons reconvenes on Sept. 14, this miserable backbiting cliffhanging Parliament will come skidding to a halt and its various inhabitants will head back home to their ridings to ask us for another chance.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his trusty adjutant, John Baird, were quick to denounce any thought of an election as irresponsible. There’s an economic crisis on, they said, and no politician’s attention should be anywhere else.
The argument will be persuasive to some voters. It’s true that there was an election only last year, but that one followed nearly three years of more-or-less productive activity, whereas a fall election this year would come after a much shorter break from the hustings.
Ignatieff, however, must have calculated he had no choice. He has been delivering a succession of I-Really-Mean-It-Now ultimatums to Harper ever since he fell into the Liberal leadership from which the party had unceremoniously ejected Stéphane Dion in, approximately, January. The moment was fast approaching when his constant warnings to Harper would be revealed to mean either (a) nothing or (b) something.
First there was the On Probation thing, in which Ignatieff agreed to support Harper’s January budget in exchange for quarterly reports on the budget’s implementation. March’s report was, the Liberals said, unacceptable, but Ignatieff said it was June’s that would tell. In June he accepted the second report, in which the Conservatives claimed 80 per cent of the budgeted fiscal stimulus was now committed to specific projects, with ill grace. He announced he had four conditions to forgoing a summer election. He wanted to know precisely, to the dollar, how much money Harper had actually spent on stimulus. He wanted a detailed plan for getting Canada’s budget out of the deficit into which Harper had dug it at the opposition parties’ urging. He wanted a plan to replace the medical isotopes the benighted Chalk River reactor can no longer make. And he wanted Employment Insurance eligibility rules relaxed markedly.
Harper met with him, spotted a fellow with the look of an easy mark, and rejected three of the conditions out of hand. He agreed only to a bipartisan panel that would spend the summer working on EI reform.
The panel’s summertime meetings were, it’s an open secret, a risible ritual of barely sublimated mutual aggression. Ignatieff came to Sudbury with nothing to show for all his huffing and puffing, and Conservative MPs, watching from a distance, were increasingly confident that if this guy was calling the shots they would make it to Christmas without trouble. After that it was only weeks to the Whistler Olympics in February, and then it would be almost summer. Suddenly it would be near the end of 2010 and, you know, why stop there? Because that’s the thing, Conservatives said privately, about drawing a line in the sand: the line’s made of sand too.
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