If there is to be a fall election this year, it is being planned now. There are therefore two possibilities with regard to recently low-profile Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Possibility one: in recent weeks he has been taking a summer break with his family. Possibility two: in recent weeks he has been holed up with advisors planning a campaign.
The former option seems more likely.
To see why, let’s tune in our friends at ThreeHundredEight.com. The site manager there has clearly caught up on his sleep and has posted a number of interesting new articles. Look, for example, at his piece on the most recent Harris-Decima poll, released on July 27.
That poll suggests the Conservatives enjoyed the support of 31 per cent of Canadians. The Liberals had 26 per cent, the New Democrats 18 per cent, and the Bloc 41 per cent in Quebec (10 per cent in the national numbers). ThreeHundredEight.com credibly projects that these numbers would elect 120 Conservatives, 92 Liberals, 41 New Democrats, and 55 MPs from the Bloc Québécois.
Small wonder, then, that conservative-minded columnists have constitutional conventions on their minds these days. My thoughtful and always-interesting blogging colleague Norman Spector, for example, recently challenged readers to think of any Canadian precedent for the party with the most seats not becoming the government.
There is a definitive Canadian precedent. Frank Miller’s Conservatives were handed 52 seats in the 1985 Ontario election. But David Peterson’s Liberals formed a government with 48 seats, thanks to an accord with Bob Rae’s 25 New Democrats.
The Harris-Decima poll suggests that at this political moment, absent any further development, Mr. Harper’s Conservatives would face a similarly difficult Parliament (from their perspective) were they to chance an election. Or would they?
There is a new element in this calculus.
This spring’s curious debate over the idea of building a single big progressive party highlighted the deep vein of loathing and fear that many in Michael Ignatieff’s Rosedale/Bay Street-centred blue Liberal faction hold for progressive policies and people. As they have made clear both publicly and privately in many venues, they feel closer to the Conservatives than to the New Democrats on many issues.
This being so, even after an election debacle on the scale suggested by these numbers, perhaps Mr. Harper could hope to work out another informal modus vivendi with the blue Liberals, whose party would be returning to the repair shop for another long visit. In which case, on these seat projections, Mr. Harper would govern with a de facto 212-seat majority, much as he is doing now.
Could Mr. Harper really count on this?
Mr. Ignatieff says he is open to building a progressive coalition government after the next election if the numbers justify it. He must say this to preserve his party’s currently faux-progressive positioning, designed to (faintly) appeal to New Democrats and Greens. But would those numbers justify such a government in his mind? Or does his conduct since January 2009 – in a fundamentally identical Parliament – tell us what he and his party wing would really do?
A pessimistic answer to this question would make a fall election more likely.
Several other factors might weigh in this mix. If the polls don’t change, there is the risk that Mr. Harper might lose Mr. Ignatieff – a Liberal Leader currently valued by all of his opponents. There is the risk of a double-dip recession, which Conservative fiscal policy would make worse. There is the risk of some scandal or fatal mistake. And as this summer’s “Censusgate” demonstrates, there is the raw fact that Mr. Harper and his strategists are ideologues who chafe at the restrictions of “Fabian libertarianism” and would like the freedom to pursue a less incremental revolution in this progressive country they despise so much (or at least the two-thirds of it that rejects their values and priorities).
