On the preposterous premise that Canadian elections are traditionally held every four years (Name one such interval in the past 10 Parliaments. Okay, name two.), the Governor-General this weekend will be asked to issue the writ, thereby divesting me of $10 foolishly wagered on a spring vote. I am consoled only by the promise of a messy, ugly, ideological bloodfest that will upset great-aunts and disturb little children. Release the lions!  Release the Christians!  Let the games begin!

Alongside the Free Trade Agreement, however, the Tories will be tempted beyond endurance to run on their economic record. However robust growth may have been during their tenure, however far unemployment may have fallen, they should resist this temptation, both for the sake of an informed debate and, since that cuts no ice whatsoever, for the grubbiest reasons of tactics.

The voters do not tend to reward governments for ''a job well done.'' Elections are not occasions for gratitude, as Winston Churchill learned to his cost. This may seem unfair or even eccentric on the voters' part, but in fact it is quite rational. What's past is past, and cannot be altered. What matters is each party's plans for the future.

Or, in economic terms, voters make their decisions at the margin. Britain's modern-day Conservatives, whose achievements are the economic match to Churchill's war, wisely acknowledged this in the last election, fought under the slogan ''The Next Move Forward.''

GROWTH INCIDENTAL

The Tories cannot count on receiving any gold stars for expansion in any event - nor even that prosperity itself will be acknowledged, as the undiminished whining over the Bank of Canada's ''high interest rate'' policy reveals. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has lately released a study arguing that economic growth in the past four years has occurred more or less incidentally to, if not actually in spite of, the actions of government.

This, again, will seem unfair to Conservatives. The usual complaint will be heard: that the government gets all the blame when times are bad, but none of the credit when times are good. But, as before, this is quite right and proper. Economic growth should correctly be understood to be the natural order of things, to which government, whatever its other uses, can add little, but from which it can subtract much.

Even the harm it can do, short of the sort of careful and systematic destruction that might be found in, say, Ethiopia, is swallowed up in the sea of individual initiative that heaves output higher. As the economist Mancur Olson has put it, ''in these days, it takes an enormous amount of stupid policies or bad or unstable institutions to prevent economic development.''

Economic growth ought not, in itself, to be a goal of public policy at all. The idea of growth as objective is informed by the same mechanistic fallacy as that of the economy as a bundle of components, one or the other of which is described as the ''engine'' of growth, to which appropriate adjustments may be made and from which predictable results may be drawn.

It is no accident that so many business economists, whose trade is forecasts, tend to a Keynesian view of the economy; nor is it strange that journalists, whose trade is certainty, tend to quote business economists; nor then should it surprise that politicians, whose trade is fantasy, should follow those journalists in offering bold prescriptions for growth. Academic economists, whose trade is skepticism, are all but ignored.

The economy is not a machine. Economic growth is not so much a project, the yield of policy, as a decision, taken spontaneously and collectively. It is the offspring of each of our individual choices between consumption and savings - the forgone consumption from which alone can growth be financed.

As such it is neither good nor bad. More savings might mean faster growth, but if growth is not enough in our subjective assessment to offset going without consumption, we are the poorer for it. As a corollary, there is no virtue in ''stimulating'' consumption or savings by artificial means. The choice is ours alone to make.

This is hardly likely to sound attractive to those in government. Why might a market-minded party make this argument all the same? Because in the long run political success stems not so much from who wins or loses the argument at hand as from who is able to set the terms of debate. If a government is able to set the criteria by which it is to be judged, then even if it fails to meet those criteria, it wins in the long run for having set them in the public mind. Even if they lose, they win.