Maybe we’ll have have an election in… 2011 (1)

“I don’t think 2011 should be out of the question,” a Liberal MP told me, leaning in conspiratorially.

For what? A summer full of sunshine? A return to three-button jackets?

“For an election,” the MP said.

This guy’s thinking, which I’ve since learned is shared by at least a few other veteran Liberals in Ottawa, is as follows. The polls don’t favour Michael Ignatieff right now, and haven’t since he announced in September he would work to bring down the Harper government at the first chance. Indeed the polls have been so stinkeroo for the Liberals that Ignatieff has had to un-announce his September announcement. Now he’s in no hurry to replace the Harper government. Some Liberals suspect Ignatieff replaced his inexperienced, poorly connected chief of staff, Ian Davey, with the wily Chrétien-era fixer Peter Donolo because Davey didn’t foresee the popular backlash against Ignatieff’s “Mr. Harper, your time is up” announcement.

Well then. If there’s no election this autumn, will there be one in the spring? Perhaps not: the Vancouver/Whistler Olympics are in February, and for some reason an ironclad conventional wisdom has sprung up that elections must not be held near an Olympics. A federal budget will soon follow the Olympics. A budget gives the Harper Conservatives a chance to spend some $230 billion. It’s not easy to make enemies while spending $230 billion. Suddenly it’s summer, when we mustn’t have an election, followed by autumn when we mustn’t have an election, I forget why not. This is what we do in Ottawa these days: stare at the calendar, shaking our heads.

Anyway, by late 2010, the recession will be well and truly over, and (my Liberal interlocutor reasoned) there’ll be no more of this stimulus spending. Instead, the government, whoever forms it, will be belt-tightening to get out of deficits. Since belt-tightening is never pleasant or popular, Liberals are thinking it might as well be Harper who is stuck with doing it. Give the nasty work a little time to grind Harper down, and suddenly it’s 2011.

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