Is Canada Getting A Surprise Election For Christmas This Year?

I don't think so. But we might end up with one by accident. That would be a mistake.

This is not how I want to go to the polls. Photo by Denny Rodriguez on Unsplash

It’s raining in Ottawa and it’s cold. It’s not a great time to play chicken with the future of the country, but here we are. The budget is next week and rumblings in the press suggest the government could fall over it. The opposition parties are weighing their options. Everybody is making demands, but there’s no ideal world, no theodicy, in which all the pressures and tensions and inconsistencies may be resolved — lower and higher taxes, more and less social program spending, government intervention to address the climate crisis and government abdication from that role. In short, something’s gotta give. So far, no one seems to want to be a giver.

The parties, or a sufficient number of them, may bargain down to their lowest reasonable offers and counter-offers and reach accord, or not. It could be a close call. The Liberals are just shy of a majority in the House of Commons, so close that mere months ago the proclamations in the press assured us Mark Carney had a working or functional or de facto majority. Now, we’re all hoping enough MPs get leave to fake a cold (there’s always something going around), miss the vote, and forgo a winter election in the cold and the dark, and amidst economic assaults from the global hegemon, who just happens to be our neighbour and top trading partner.

Fred Delorey, who knows plenty about political manoeuvring and party machinations, writes that we are indeed heading for an election. He makes a compelling case, particularly regarding the New Democratic Party, which is in the middle of a leadership election. He argues the party could gain seats in an election given their strong ground game and, at the very least, they would get to reset. He thinks the Liberals would stand a chance at winning the framing war over what the election is about, and who caused it. Is that a majority they see over the snowbanks? The Conservatives can’t possibly vote for this budget and expect to remain a government in waiting. The Greens — one seat — are out over fossil fuel subsidies. The Bloc, meanwhile, is making big demands around old age security of the sort the Liberals can’t possibly meet.