With Parliament scheduled to return from summer break in three weeks, much of the anticipated drama revolves around whether the opposition will screw up the courage to bring the minority Conservatives down.
Or will they wait until what promises to be a painful, spending-cut budget in March to do the deed?
The election-triggering showdown may or may not happen, but one piece of political drama will.
On Sept. 22, MPs vote on an opposition motion to kill Candice Hoeppner’s private member’s bill to abolish the long gun registry. If the vote fails, the Manitoba rookie backbencher’s bill will almost certainly be approved in a later vote.
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The politics of the issue, long seen as a classic example of the rural-urban divide, are fascinating.
In November, 12 mainly rural New Democrats and eight Liberals voted with Conservatives to support the Hoeppner bill in principle.
Since then, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has ordered his eight MPs to vote for the registry, promising that a Liberal government would make the law less intrusive and punitive.
Will all eight follow the leader or will a few defy him or call in sick? If they support the Liberal position, it will be a potent issue in their ridings in the next election and several of those Liberals had a close brush with political death in the last election.
More intriguing are the New Democrats. Toronto MP and pro-registry leader Jack Layton expanded the caucus and elected more than a dozen rural MPs in the last election.
But most of those rural MPs oppose the registry because their voters do. Layton, unlike Ignatieff, has promised the vote on the private member’s bill will follow the parliamentary tradition of being a free vote, devoid of party discipline.
So how will the dissident dozen vote? The Conservatives need just eight or nine of them to win a vote.
At least four have said they plan to vote with their constituents.
The rest have been noncommittal, under intense pressure from Conservatives and constituents during this summer break to stick to their guns, so to speak.
Hoeppner has announced a tour of their ridings in the weeks leading up to the vote.
Last week, the battlefield was Canada’s police community, typically a natural constituency for the tough-on- crime Conservatives.
But at a convention in Edmonton, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police voted to support maintenance of the registry. The police union has supported the registry as a tool to help officers know where guns might be when they respond to calls.
But 20-year Edmonton police officer Randy Kuntz went public last week with the results of a survey in which he asked frontline officers if they supported the registry as a crime-fighting tool or a way to keep police officers safer. He said 92 percent of the 2,631 officers who responded said they did not.
Opposition MPs jumped on the police chiefs’ statement. Conservatives jumped on the rank-and-file survey.
The battle lines surely have been drawn and the political stakes are high. Sept. 22 will be an evening of high drama on Parliament Hill.
