Everybody wants an election nobody wants
You’d be that way, too, if you were in his position. The two men who stand in the way of his majority ambitions, Stéphane Dion and Gilles Duceppe, are gravely weakened, the one beset by internal divisions, the other by a generalized apathy towards his party. Though both have talked tough about an election, their very words belie them.
If, after all, the Bloc were really looking to bring the government down, the very last thing they would do would be to issue a list of “non-negotiable” demands. Voters don’t like parties that don’t play nice. They want politicians to work together across party lines, or at least to give a convincing impression of doing so. The Bloc, especially, has always been careful not to leave themselves open to the charge of obstructionism -- they know they were sent to Ottawa to “defend Quebec,” to keep the other parties honest, not to make mischief.
So if the Bloc were really bent on forcing the country into an election, they would be at pains to ensure someone else took the blame for it. Mr. Duceppe would bite his lip, dolefully, as he announced that, at long last, his patience had run out. He had gone the extra mile, sought negotiations at every turn, tried to make this parliament work, but alas, the government’s intransigence had made it impossible.
That the Bloc sought instead to sound as obdurate as possible can only be explained, rather, in terms of weakness -- their own, and the Liberals’. Having taken a pasting in last month’s by-elections, the Bloc needed to reassure its supporters that it still had some fight in it. And with the Liberals in even worse shape, the Bloc were in a position to take a free kick. They could threaten havoc, knowing the Grits would ensure it never happened.
The Liberals, for their part, have been keen to let it be known that, though they might appear in every respect unready for an election -- divided, broke, adrift -- they’re actually champing at the bit. Mr. Dion is said to have confided to advisers his belief that he would resonate better with voters in an election campaign, where he could make a serious, sustained case for his candidacy, than in the Ottawa funhouse.
There may be some truth in this, but the interesting part is that we know about it -- that we should be privy to his innermost thoughts on the matter. To me the subtext that suggests is: We have to give people some clever, contrarian reason why we’d want an election (another option: that Mr. Dion has successfully managed expectations down) since there is in fact nothing that terrifies us more.
No wonder Mr. Harper looked so confident. I don’t think we should interpret his “fish or cut bait” challenge to the opposition as an invitation to a fall election. He doesn’t want one, either, not now: with the Tories still mired at 33% in the polls, there’s little to be gained just yet. More to the point, he doesn’t need one. He can press forward with his agenda, or at least those parts of his agenda that overlap with the public’s -- crime, taxes -- knowing the opposition will not dare to bring him down over them. And time is on his side: the longer he stays in power, the more comfortable the public gets with him.
Meantime, he can use his opponents’ weakness to gain yards: to take the centre ground for Conservatives, not by moving to the middle, but by moving the middle to him. “Reasonable... realistic... responsible” -- count the number of times he used those words on Wednesday, even as he was taking a noticeably harder line on questions of policy. On Afghanistan, on taxes, on the “hollowing out” nonsense, the Prime Minister sounded, for the first time in a long while, like a conservative -- yet insulated from charges of provocation by the opposition’s own provocative rhetoric.
Non-negotiable? Shucks, no. Everything’s negotiable, when you know the other side has no leverage.
10/05/2007
