Want an election? Me? You're crazy!

Put another nail in the coffin for this parliament. The Conservatives are quickly and quietly putting the pieces in place for the election Steve Harper still continues to insist he totally doesn't want for a few more years yet.

On Friday, the Conservatives decided to cancel their national policy convention, which was scheduled for November in Winnipeg. If I can digress for a moment…November in Winnipeg, December in Montreal, do all political parties hate their members? Can we all get on board with bringing the Turks and Caicos into Canada? Now that's a winter convention location I could get behind.

Anyway, the convention was postponed until fall 2008 because of the imminent possibility of an election. Also, attending both the CPC campaign college this month and the convention could have put people over the legal donation limit, and I guess they've decided to start following that law for a change.

More interesting to note though is the recent change in messaging from the Con spinners. It was typified by Jim Prentice on CTV's Question Period over the weekend. Rather than the usual line of we don't want an election, we're going to govern until 2010 or whenever their fixed election date is, here's what Prentice had to say:

Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice refused Sunday to dampen election speculation, repeatedly coming back to the immediate parliamentary calendar when asked about his party's rising stock.

"I see a very busy month ahead," Prentice said when asked whether rising polling numbers for the Tories suggest to him a majority mandate is within sight.

"I see the budget coming later in the month. (Environment Minister) John Baird has spoken about his plans relative to the environment in the month ahead. So it's going to be a month that Canadians will be able to take stock of how this government is moving forward in a very activist way."

Your key phrase there is "taking stock." As in hey, look at all the great stuff we've done, don't we deserve to be re-elected, maybe with a majority, please? (Unless he was pleading for Stock Day to cross the floor…take Stock, please!) A subtle change perhaps, but I think in conjunction with Prentice's refusal to offer the usual "we don't want an election" platitude a telling one.

So, yet another piece of evidence Harper will be engineering his own defeat and triggering an election sooner, rather that later. I'm betting this spring. No doubt he's at home now practicing his totally surprised, didn't want this election, it's all the Liberal's fault face.

Really, though, particularly in minorities, all the time all parties spend to try to not "get blamed" for precipitating an election is rather lame. A few days in, most people could care less who started it. They just want to finish it.

Recommend this Post on Progressive Bloggers