I Hope You're Right John....I Have A Lot Of Chores Around The House

John Ivison: No summer election, despite alpha-male posturing Posted: May 26, 2009, 7:38 PM by Chris Boutet

Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff stood across the aisle from one another in the House of Commons Tuesday, like two male fiddler crabs waving their grotesquely enlarged claws at one another.

Their argument was ostensibly over Employment Insurance, and whether the government should lower the eligibility bar to allow more workers to qualify.

Why won’t Mr. Harper fix EI and “help Canadians in their hour of need?" asked Mr. Ignatieff. The Liberal leader voted for the budget, and the government cannot change the budget every two to three months, replied the Prime Minister.

In reality, the quarrel was as old as evolution — two alpha males waving their exaggerated features around in order to attract females — albeit on this occasion to extract their votes.

The Conservatives are said to have contemplated making it easier to access EI in areas of the country where unemployment has traditionally been low — a move that would have gone down well in vote-rich Ontario. More changes may yet come — the Prime Minister said Tuesday “we will be spending a lot more money on the system.”

But what Mr. Harper will not do apparently, is grant any concessions to Mr. Ignatieff. The Prime Minister is upset that the Liberal leader is strutting around the country like a peacock, threatening to bring down the government. He was in Halifax last weekend, where he directed his latest barb at Mr. Harper. “If you mess with me, I’ll mess with you until I’m done,” he said, a line he may have picked up at that notorious school of hard knocks, Harvard.

This faintly comedic reference to the Chicago Way from The Untouchables — “he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue” — culminated in Mr. Ignatieff threatening to bring down the government with a confidence motion at the end of June, which would result in an election in late July.

“I can foresee it and I can foresee it in the near future,” he said.

This was music to Conservative ears. “Let’s see what he’s made of,” said one advisor gleefully. There is a feeling that Mr. Ignatieff has overplayed his hand and is now faced with either blundering into an election there’s no guarantee he’d win or climbing down on his EI demands.

An election, of course, is not going to happen. For one thing, Mr. Ignatieff clearly does not want one. His first response on Monday when he was asked whether he wanted to bring down the government was: “We’re not there yet.”

The Liberals say they have secured a plane and have arranged debt financing to fund another election campaign. But they still have to come up with a convincing reason, other than a lust for power, why they should plunge the country into the fourth election in five years.

The government is already spending billions on EI — one of the reasons, according to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, that the deficit will balloon to $50-billion this year. Sure, there are problems with the existing system — is it easier to find a new job in Oshawa at the moment than it is in rural Newfoundland, even though the unemployment rate for the latter is twice as high? Probably not. But as the jobless rate rises in Oshawa, so the number of hours required to qualify for EI will fall. It is certainly not an issue over which it is worth provoking an election that would effectively shut down the public service and freeze the stimulus money the country is relying on to weather the recession.

Another powerful reason why all the election talk is hogwash is that the most recent polls show no one is likely to benefit. True, the Liberals are polling higher than they did back in October but this week’s Ipsos Reid survey indicates they are effectively neck and neck with the Conservatives. The poll suggests the Tories have been given their first bounce in months by an economy that seems to be stabilizing and by the attack ads on Mr. Ignatieff.

The NDP would likely lose seats if there were an election in the summer, which explains their reluctance to force a vote. Nonetheless, party insiders insist they have a plane and financing in place and would not shy from fighting an election on EI.

Perhaps everyone should just stay off the Red Bull for a day or so. The Prime Minister is said to be in a pugnacious mood, more than happy to trade blows with Mr. Ignatieff. On Tuesday’s evidence though, it might be as well for him to take a break after a long, weary winter and spring. He rose to answer an insult disguised as a question from Liberal finance critic John McCallum on the government’s inability to contain the deficit, and committed a Freudian slip that suggests he recognizes any government $50-billion in the red will have to bolster its income somehow.

“What we are not going to do is, every two or three months, come up with another economic policy, another budget until we need to raise taxes. Our deficits are affordable but they will remain short-term,” he said.

When questioned about it later, Mr. Harper professed not to know what the Liberals were talking about. There’s a good reason this is known as the political silly season.