1. Guns blazing. Michael Ignatieff has been advised not to pick any fights with Stephen Harper’s Tories that may provoke an election, but clearly the NDP is fair game.
Liberals devoted a lot of time over their two-day caucus meeting to attacking NDP Leader Jack Layton and his deputy, Thomas Mulcair, for refusing to force their MPs to vote to keep the long-gun registry.
In news conferences and speeches, Mr. Ignatieff accused Mr. Layton of lacking leadership and principles.
At a rally Monday night, the Liberal Leader echoed what he said he heard from a supporter in Manitoba: “You know the problem with the NDP? Do you know what it stands for? No darn principle.”
He got a big laugh from his supporters. “On this gun registry stuff they’ve got to step up or they have no darn principles,” Mr. Ignatieff added.
And in an interview with The Globe and Mail, the Liberal Leader mocked Mr. Layton’s efforts to find a compromise position on the issue. “Jack is saying let’s find a compromise. I have been saying that for nine months. Where has he been?”
Mr. Ignatieff says Mr. Layton is the like the guy “who’s stolen the clothes off the clothes line and showed up at my wedding in my suit. It’s just ridiculous.”
The vote to scrap the gun registry is scheduled for Sept. 22. Fighting to keep the registry is one of Mr. Ignatieff’s preoccupations for the fall sitting.
2. Aerial dogfight. The $16-billion purchase of 65 new F-35 Lightning stealth fighter jets could come back to bite the Harper government, Liberals were told Tuesday.
Party pollster Michael Marzolini believes the jets are the sleeper issue of the fall, telling the Grit caucus that Canadians don’t understand why the military needs them.
Michael Ignatieff has picked up on this, vowing to “hold [the Harper government] to account on single source contract for the joint strike fighter.”
The military, however, is defending the purchase. Canada needs stealth fighters, the head of the air force says, so it can sneak up on adversaries at the edges of domestic airspace and use that potential for surprise as a deterrent to incursions on sovereignty.
And the Prime Minister is in Montreal on Wednesday with Defence Minister Peter MacKay. The pair are expected to announce a $500-million maintenance contract for the military’s existing fleet of CF-18s.
3. Counting Canadians. The Liberals want the mandatory long-form census to be restored. When the House returns this month, they will try to put forward a private members’ bill that does just that.
Internal polling shows this is a good issue for them. They’ve had traction with national data showing gains from university-educated Canadians angry over the government’s decision to alter the census.
This week, Michael Ignatieff accused Stephen Harper of making bogeymen out of Statistics Canada employees. “He made an attack on an institution that Canadians trusted and he did so in order to make you afraid of a group of people you’ve never been afraid of in your life, that is the census takers.”
The Liberal Leader added: “We don’t do politics like that.”
And in an interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Ignatieff decried the “ridiculous” way in which the Harper government tries to “vandalize institutions that Canadians trust like the gun registry, like the long-form census, like veterans’ programs.”
But the Liberals are not talking about toppling the Conservatives in an election any time soon.
Mr. Ignatieff thinks voters still need to be convinced the Liberals offer an alternative.
“There are still a lot of Canadians who need to hear the message there is a Liberal alternative, and so we want to put out more policy this fall,” he said.
“… All of that comes together and all of that will sustain momentum we got through the summer.”
