Michael Ignatieff has sworn off any election talk since his spectacular climb-down last fall. But that isn’t stopping his Liberals from preparing for one, possibly by next fall.
The long-anticipated Liberal election platform is to be ready and “fully-costed” by the end of the summer, a senior Ignatieff official said this week.
And even more telling is that the Liberals have started once again to look for an election-campaign airplane.
Air Inuit, the airline provider for Stéphane Dion’s unsuccessful election effort in 2008, is not an option. The plane was an old bruiser, it was the only one the Liberals could secure and people mocked it.
Skyservice – the charter airline that was rumoured to be leasing a plane to the Liberals in anticipation of an election last fall – went out of business at the end of March.
“We will have a plane … discussions are going on with various providers now and we don’t anticipate any problem,” the senior Ignatieff official said.
The Conservatives and NDP, meanwhile, have on-going arrangements with Air Canada.
All of this activity is prompting the question – one that is asked repeatedly of politicians – when is the next election?
EKOS pollster Frank Graves believes it’s the fall for sure.
“This Parliament is past its best-before shelf date,” he said, adding that it is dysfunctional; no one likes each other and the public is increasingly growing tired of this fractious minority government.
In addition to that, Mr. Graves said, polling data show that Canadians (more than 50 per cent) believe an election will come this year and they are not as adverse to the idea as they were last fall.
Not everyone is so sure, however.
Pollara’s Michael Marzolini, who polled for the Chrétien Liberals during their three majority governments, is putting some money (though not his entire fortune) on an election this September.
“All the political parties are thinking about this all the time ... it’s what they live for,” he said.
Unlike Mr. Graves, however, he still believes the public is not terribly keen to go to the polls.
Only a “significant shift in public opinion” would motivate any of the parties to trigger an election, he said.
But Mr. Marzolini believes a shift can happen – not as a result of one issue but “by the randomness of half a dozen factors coinciding to give a party a surge or a fast drop.”
Right now, according to most national opinion polls, the Tories are just slightly ahead of the Liberals but not enough that they could win a majority government.
And then there is Dimitri Pantazopoulos of Praxicus Research, who has polled in the past for Stephen Harper.
He’s not sold on a fall 2010 election.
“If I were a betting man, I would put my money on everyone becoming impatient and collectively jumping over the electoral cliff in the fall of 2011,” he said.
“It will be 36 months into the mandate, twice the length of historical minority mandates, and 18 months into the current Parliamentary session.”
Mr. Pantazopoulos predicts the election will be sparked by the Harper Conservatives putting forward an issue that the Liberals cannot stomach.
Until then, however, he believes the Tories will try to hold on.
“For the Conservatives, every day in government is a day out of opposition,” the pollster said. “Furthermore, every day Ignatieff remains Opposition leader is a day that Ignatieff has to perform political gymnastics to support the government even as he appears to oppose and criticize their actions.”
As for the Liberals, the Ignatieff official said they don’t “want to speculate on election dates.”
But, he said, he would not be surprised if Mr. Harper tried to engineer his own defeat.
“We’ll be ready whenever an election is called.”
