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Stephen Harper is out of town now pretty much until January, travelling the world, attending summits and important meetings in Singapore, India, China, and Trinidad and Tobago.

A smart strategy on his part: He looks prime ministerial on the international stage, while on the domestic front, he steers clear of the smears and jeers of the daily Question Period.

But Mr. Harper's absence does something else. It gives Opposition Leaders Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton a lot of room to manoeuvre.

What to expect? What to do?

Well, if you're Mr. Ignatieff, who has been struggling of late, you might want to listen to fellow Liberal Frank McKenna.

He has a good idea: Do what Stephen Harper is doing, and stay away from the House of Commons.

“The House is a hard place for an opposition leader to win. Very hard,” he said. “So I think he's smart to be around the country and expose himself to people.”

Mr. McKenna is a former Canadian ambassador to Washington, and was also a very successful Liberal premier in New Brunswick.

Although he knows how to win, he also knows what it is like in Opposition, having spent two years there. And he said it is “really awful.” He feels Mr. Ignatieff's pain.

“I spent two years in Opposition, and it's one of the reasons I vowed I would never voluntarily go back,” said Mr. McKenna, who was doing interviews to help promote a new biography, Frank McKenna: Beyond Politics by Harvey Sawler. “If you are a positive person by nature and not terribly partisan by nature, it is very sterile and unsatisfying. You feel like you're criticizing things that you don't always think should be criticized, and you're often attacking people that you may personally like.”

He said he stayed away from the legislature for his first two years and tried to build the party, fill its coffers, find candidates and be ready “for the right opportunity.”

As for Mr. Ignatieff and his Liberals, who are looking wobbly these days, Mr. McKenna said: “Give it time.

“In Canada we do tend to be very hard on our tall poppies,” he said. “… It's important that successful, capable business leaders and academic leaders and other leaders see a future in politics. If we made the job look like it's so personally unsatisfying that we can't attract good leaders, the country suffers.”

A leader who is not suffering these days is the NDP's Mr. Layton. There's a new spring in his step. His party won back its seat in B.C. this week in a by-election in which issues such as the salmon crisis and the harmonized sales tax were front and centre. These are issues the federal NDP have been trumpeting.

“You never want to read too, too much into a by-election because of turnouts,” Mr. Layton said. “… Still, it says something about the thousands of people that did go out [to vote] and also the ones who didn't … I think that the HST began to stick to the Conservatives here for the first time.”

He said he believes that B.C. voters finally began to realize that the HST, which is to take effect next July 1, was not just a provincial issue but a federal one as well. He thinks it could be significant in Ontario (which is also bringing in the tax) and B.C. in the next election.

There is fear, however, that before B.C.'s 2010 Winter Olympics in February, the Harper Tories may try to bring in their budget with billions of dollars in federal funding to the provinces to clear the way for the HST.

He said that “would be a particularly nasty thing to do to Canadians” – force a vote in the House of Commons that leads to a new tax or an election – just before the Games.

“Wouldn't that be classic Stephen Harper?” Mr. Layton asked. “Just before the Olympics, stick it to the Opposition and try to blame them for an election.”

He said he doesn't know how things will play out as he and his MPs return to the House on Monday.

As for the Liberals, Mr. Ignatieff recently announced he is adopting the NDP strategy of considering each confidence vote on its merits.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.