Rarely are both government and opposition boxed in by the same issue.
All parties, however, are united in their discomfort with the misbegotten centrepiece of last spring's Ontario budget - a two-year public sector wage freeze that Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said was absolutely essential to getting the province's books in order.
Today, that plan has gone badly off the rails. A series of arbitration rulings, the latest for hospital nurses, has awarded salary increases that make a mockery of Mr. Duncan's tough stand. So an issue all parties seem to wish would just go away is instead rising to the fore.
The biggest problem, clearly, is for Dalton McGuinty's Liberals, who don't appear to have ever quite wrapped their heads around a promise that came as a surprise even to many within government.
Freezing wages for non-unionized employees was fairly easy. But to impose across-the-board wage freezes as collective agreements came up for negotiation, i.e. getting it done with the bulk of the broader public sector, would have required either a very soft touch from labour or a very heavy hand from the government - neither of which has been much in evidence.
There seems to have been some expectation that, recognizing they've had it good under the Liberals, unions would throw a bone. But rare is the labour leader who wants to go to the membership with news that he rolled over. So with the odd exception, little was achieved by a series of meetings that brought government representatives together with public organizations such as universities and their employees.
Within government, there was some push to go nuclear, by imposing new deals through legislation. That would be a risky legal proposition, because of a 2007 British Columbia court ruling setting the precedent that provinces must respect the collective bargaining process. But the meetings, which began in late summer, might have given enough cover.
The Liberals have held off anyway, presumably because their campaign strategy in next year's election will revolve largely around painting Conservative Leader Tim Hudak as the reincarnation of Mike Harris. It wouldn't be especially helpful to stage their own re-enactment of the Harris era, with daily protests on the lawn of Queen's Park.
So Mr. Duncan, who argued last spring that the province would have to cut services if it didn't flat-line salaries, has recently been stuck trying to explain that relatively generous arbitration settlements are no big deal. With Mr. McGuinty reiterating on Tuesday that the government won't provide any additional funds to public-sector partners to pay for wage increases, it's hard to see how those cuts aren't inevitable.
At first glance, it appears the Liberals are serving up a juicy election issue on a silver platter. The Tories could profit from hostility toward a civil service perceived to have been insulated from the effects (and after-effects) of recession, and toward the Liberals for backing down from a fight.
But the Conservatives are cognizant of their own vulnerabilities, and don't want to play too much into the Liberals' campaign theme. Going after bureaucrats is one thing. But insisting on a no-holds-barred, across-the-board freeze would also mean going after professions such as teachers and nurses - and conjuring images of the kind of labour unrest that disrupts a lot more lives.
So Mr. Hudak, who normally pounces on the smallest misstep, has been noticeably restrained on a very big one. His party is happy to accuse Mr. McGuinty of being too generous to public employees during his first six years in office. But the Tories have yet to give any clear sense of what they think the Liberals should be doing differently now.
In a similar vein, but on the other side of the spectrum, the New Democrats - trying to broaden their appeal under Andrea Horwath's leadership - have also been reluctant to play to type. To the annoyance of some of her own caucus, Ms. Horwath held back from sharply criticizing the wage-freeze vow off the bat. She's since been a little more critical, but not with the fervour one would expect from the party of organized labour.
In an overheated pre-election climate, the three sides don't agree on much. But privately, they'd probably all agree life would be simpler if Mr. Duncan had settled on a different deficit-fighting plan.