BARRING an unexpected abduction of the prime minister by alien scientists this week trying to find out how his hair stays in place in the wind, Stephen Harper will signal by week’s end that the country is heading into its 40th election campaign in mid-October.
For both Harper and Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, the political stakes could hardly be higher.
One of them almost certainly will lose his job. It is difficult to imagine a defeated Dion being given a second chance by his party and it is equally difficult to imagine a defeated Harper being willing to return to opposition benches.
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He now has the only job he really wants in Ottawa.
For rural western Canadian voters who care about the Canadian Wheat Board issue, the stakes also will be high. A re-elected Conservative government would push ahead trying to finish the job they have started of dismantling the CWB monopoly.
And you can be sure that if a re-elected Conservative government also maintains the stranglehold the party has had on western rural seats for several elections, Conservatives will be quick to claim that despite the noise made by CWB supporters, the issue simply isn’t that important to most rural voters.
Based on recent campaigns, a handful of rural prairie seats could be at play but the real rural battleground will be Ontario and the Maritimes.
Still, a senior government official said late last week that the Conservatives will not be assuming the western base is secure.
“I don’t think we take any part of the country for granted,” he said. “We are stronger on the Prairies than in other parts of the country but we certainly will run a strong campaign there.”
Of course, issues will vary across the country. Nationally, opposition MPs will characterize the Conservatives as incompetent fiscal managers, right-wing ideological zealots outside the Canadian mainstream and slavish followers of American Republican policies.
Conservatives will focus on the controversial Liberal carbon tax proposal and the fact that the Liberals, by refusing to defeat the government for the past two years, were responsible for implementation of all the policies they will be campaigning against.
But if the Conservatives have their way, the real election issue will be leadership.
Harper versus Dion, strength, experience and decisiveness versus weakness, inexperience and vacillation.
That is how Conservative operatives have been trying to frame the “ballot question” when they talk to reporters. That is how their election advertisements will tilt.
Dion is untried, untested and muddled. “Stéphane Dion’s Liberals, they’re just not worth the risk,” junior minister Jason Kenny said Aug. 29 when commenting on reports of Liberal candidate dissent over carbon tax implications.
It sounds like a Tory researcher has been dipping into Canadian election history to find lines for the 2008 campaigners.
In 1935 after five years of Depression and misery and Conservative government, Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King and the Liberals campaigned on the slogan: King or Chaos. King, considered yesterday’s man after losing the prime minister’s job in 1930, kicked butt.
King or Chaos. Certainty or Risk. Hmm.
