Paul Wells is a well-respected Ottawa columnist for Macleans magazine and author of a pretty good book about Stephen Harper's rise to power called Right Side Up.
Mr. Wells is not only an intelligent analyst, he also appears to be a very resourceful reporter. How resourceful? He found the only smart Liberal MP in the Ignatieff caucus.
“I don’t think 2011 should be out of the question,” a Liberal MP told me, leaning in conspiratorially.If Michael Ignatieff was as smart as everybody insists that he is, this would have been his game plan all along.
For what? A summer full of sunshine? A return to three-button jackets? “For an election,” the MP said.
This guy’s thinking, which I’ve since learned is shared by at least a few other veteran Liberals in Ottawa, is as follows. The polls don’t favour Michael Ignatieff right now, and haven’t since he announced in September he would work to bring down the Harper government at the first chance. Indeed the polls have been so stinkeroo for the Liberals that Ignatieff has had to un-announce his September announcement. Now he’s in no hurry to replace the Harper government. Some Liberals suspect Ignatieff replaced his inexperienced, poorly connected chief of staff, Ian Davey, with the wily Chrétien-era fixer Peter Donolo because Davey didn’t foresee the popular backlash against Ignatieff’s “Mr. Harper, your time is up” announcement.
Well then. If there’s no election this autumn, will there be one in the spring? Perhaps not: the Vancouver/Whistler Olympics are in February, and for some reason an ironclad conventional wisdom has sprung up that elections must not be held near an Olympics. A federal budget will soon follow the Olympics. A budget gives the Harper Conservatives a chance to spend some $230 billion. It’s not easy to make enemies while spending $230 billion. Suddenly it’s summer, when we mustn’t have an election, followed by autumn when we mustn’t have an election, I forget why not. This is what we do in Ottawa these days: stare at the calendar, shaking our heads.
Anyway, by late 2010, the recession will be well and truly over, and (my Liberal interlocutor reasoned) there’ll be no more of this stimulus spending. Instead, the government, whoever forms it, will be belt-tightening to get out of deficits. Since belt-tightening is never pleasant or popular, Liberals are thinking it might as well be Harper who is stuck with doing it. Give the nasty work a little time to grind Harper down, and suddenly it’s 2011.
The problem is that Ignatieff isn't all that smart. Not only is he one of the most politically inexperienced leaders of a major party in Canadian history, he surrounded himself with a politically inexperienced staff. That led to major mistakes being made. Mistakes that may still prove fatal for him.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a fiscal update last November that allowed the three opposition parties to join together and announce a coalition that would have essentially been a majority government. The only problem was that that coalition turned out to be less popular than certain forms of cancer in English Canada. We're of the silly opinion that our governments, even minority governments, should be elected by the people.
The fallout from the coalition debacle promptly ended Stephane Dion's leadership. Instead of having a contested leadership campaign, the Liberals decided they needed to be ready for an immediate election and anointed Michael Ignatieff. Therefore, not only was he already deeply inexperienced, he didn't even have to win a contested leadership race. Ignatieff promptly confused desperation with acclaim and things went downhill from there.
Since threatening an election and then backing away after it became clear that nobody likes him, Ignatieff has a chance to rebuild both his reputation and his electoral prospects. Over the last few weeks there has been a wholesale purge of the amateurs in his office, and actual adults are taking over. No one is talking about an election anymore.
But the damage might already have been done. Liberal MPs are freelancing in the media, which is never a good sign and something you rarely see in the Conservative or NDP caucuses. Ignatieff's former Quebec lieutenant, Denis Coderre, is openly musing about being leader himself and the Office of the Leader of the Opposition is doing nothing about it. If Coderre can do that in public, who knows what Iggy's hated rival Bob Rae is up to in private?
Unless and until the Liberals learn some discipline, there is a very real prospect that Ignatieff will be dumped by his own caucus or forced to resign to avoid the humiliation of being dumped. Liberals are a mercenary sort and don't cotton to failure well. Just ask Paul Martin.
People are going to remember the coalition proposal, and they're going to remember that Ignatieff attempted to force an election against the people's wishes in the middle of an economic crisis. If there's even a hint of an election in the next year, the onus will be on the Grits to prove it isn't their fault.
Worse, with the Liberals now being more afraid of an election than anybody, they're going to have little choice but to support any legislation the Conservatives propose. The NDP will only be more than happy to let the Grits return to looking silly, which is exactly what supporting the government all the time while calling yourself the opposition is.
They're completely boxed in until the economy recovers, which will take about a year.
There is, however, one scenario that Paul Wells hasn't considered. What if Harper isn't around in 2011?
Stephen Harper is a lot of things, but a dumb politician ain't one of them. He's at least as savvy as Jean Chretien was and maybe as tactically brilliant as Brian Mulroney. He has to know that the difficulty level of winning once the economy fully recovers increases by several degrees. That's doubly true if the Liberals run to his right and campaign against the "Harper deficits."
The prime minister can read a poll as well as I can, and he must have noticed that even when Ignatieff was in full implosion mode this fall, he still wasn't in clear majority territory in any of the polls.
By the summer of 2011, Stephen Harper will only be 52 years old. He'll have also run two leadership campaigns and three general elections in just nine years. Why would he want to sully a pretty impressive record by getting thrown out of office when he can retire and make a ton of money in the private sector?
Then there are the considerations of history. If Harper stays and loses, he gets branded as a loser. If he retires, the Tories will almost certainly give the leadership to someone like Jason Kenney, who even Ignatieff could crush like a beer can. If that happens, Harper will be remembered as the Conservative who knew how to win.
As hard as I try, I can't come up with more reasons for him to stay than I can for him to go. Retirement isn't just in his personal interest, it's in his political interest as well.
My guess is that he leaves sometime next summer.
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