The fun thing about Ottawa is that it’s a town where people will swear with a straight face that they’re not thinking about a thing they are definitely thinking about, which is also the thing everyone is talking about.
This week, that thing is snap-election speculation.
It’s easy to picture the polls batting their eyelashes and waving seductively at the Liberals right now, with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s party sitting five points ahead of the Conservatives in popular support. That advantage is worth even more with the NDP at 8 per cent and in the middle of a leadership race to sort out its next incarnation.
The enthusiasm gap is much larger on an individual basis: Mr. Carney now sits 29 points ahead of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre when pollsters ask Canadians about their preferred Prime Minister. And while Mr. Carney earned a substantial popularity bump after his speech in Davos, Mr. Poilievre got no such boost from the Calgary convention where Conservative party members resoundingly endorsed him.
Accordingly, reporters have started asking federal politicians whether a snap election is looking tantalizing to the Liberals and terrifying to the Tories right now. And in response to these very predictable questions, a tragic and hilarious epidemic of feigned bewilderment has taken over. My stars, no one in Ottawa has ever had such a craven thought besmirch even the darkest corners of their mind!
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A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Carney stood in a grocery store touting a GST rebate top-up he said would help low-income families with groceries and essentials. A reporter asked point-blank if he was considering a spring election, but no such thing had occurred to the Prime Minister.
“What we’re focused on is solutions for Canadians,” he said. “So today’s announcement, we will be tabling legislation soon, very soon. We would love, and we think it’s very important, to have collaboration so we can move that quickly through Parliament.”
The reporter tried again, pointing out that the produce-department setting and the government flinging favours at Canadians sure felt election-y. So, really, you’re not considering it?
“Well, of course, we’re not,” Mr. Carney said. “We’re focused on results for Canadians. We’re working through Parliament to get results for Canadians.”
This manages to be both a dismissal of the question in the moment, and a trap door that Mr. Carney and his government could grease themselves up to slip through later. If they decided to trigger an election, they might justify it by declaring that Parliament is not working, despite their own ardent desire to “get results for Canadians.”
But the Prime Minister has company in declaring that he is absolutely not thinking about a thing that anyone with three political brain cells would obviously be considering.
Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer did an interview with CTV this week, in which the host spent 10 minutes trying to get him to acknowledge that the Tories’ spirit of co-operation in recent weeks was related to the possibility of an election they would lose badly. But such thoughts were the furthest thing from their minds.
“I just refuse to accept the premise that there’s a change in posture,” Mr. Scheer said, of the gauche idea that the Tories had a case of political oppositional defiant disorder back in the fall and had suddenly turned relatively helpful out of naked fear.
He explained that out of respect for the Parliament that Canadians chose less than a year ago, the Official Opposition would enable the government to do its work, and everyone could see if those policies improved things.
Of course, in the same conversation, Mr. Scheer also reminded everyone of “out-of-control” Liberal spending, that Liberals will line the pockets of their rich friends the second you turn your back, that “criminals run free in our streets” because of them and that everything has gotten worse over the past year.
“We respect that Mark Carney has the right to attempt to solve some of these problems that Liberals themselves caused,” Mr. Scheer said gravely. This is a bit like accusing someone of burning down your house, then declaring that you’ll let them salt the earth where it stood before you pass judgment on their work.
But this is where Ottawa is right now: locked into a game of co-operation chicken.
The Conservatives want to appear helpful enough to deny the Liberals a pretext to go to the polls because of a supposedly gridlocked House of Commons. But the Opposition needs to do so without conceding that the Liberals are anything less than ruinous.
And Tuesday’s Question Period – the last day before parliamentarians and the country at large paused normalcy to grapple with the heartbreak and horror of Tumbler Ridge – saw the Liberals test out a strategy of their own.
Mr. Carney kicked it off, offering an “Economy 101″ lesson to Mr. Poilievre about how grocery prices don’t improve instantly when a new government takes over – especially when it’s surrounded by stubborn rebellion.
“The party across the way engaged in so much obstruction during the last Parliament that now, there’s an effect of that,” Mr. Carney said.
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He and Mr. Poilievre traded barbs about who was more obstructionist, before other MPs joined them in celebrating the word of the day. If you could buy stock in word usage, variations on “obstruction” over the next few months could guarantee you early retirement.
But while the political needle-threading for Mr. Poilievre’s party is awkward in trying to avoid an election right now, the trade-off for Mr. Carney if he tried to force one could be a much uglier problem.
His entire political persona has been adult in the room, the cool-headed pragmatist who could have done anything with his gilded CV, but who chose to roll up his sleeves for the country in a moment of crisis.
That identity set Mr. Carney apart from Mr. Poilievre, from the reviled ghost of Justin Trudeau’s government, and from the seething madness of Donald Trump. It’s granted the Prime Minister enormous public credibility that doesn’t seem to have run out yet.
You can never really know what someone wants until they do something about it. And it’s entirely possible that all of this strategy and speculation is an Ottawa parlour game in a city that sure loves to play them.
But if an opportunistic political move was on the table, it could undercut everything the Prime Minister has embodied so far. It would suggest that Mark Carney was the one thing he was not supposed to be in this oily world of politics: just like the rest of them.