OTTAWA – The Conservatives are poised to kill off any chance of a spring election by using the parliamentary calendar to delay a possible non-confidence motion from the Liberals.
The Tories have told some of their rivals that they will push back the Liberals’ so-called opposition day – their easiest opportunity to table a non-confidence motion – to June 17.
Such a move would leave opposition parties with two options: trigger a rare midsummer election with a national vote on July 27 at the earliest, or keep the government alive until later this year.
The tactic is reminiscent of one used by the Liberal government in 2005, when it feared being defeated at the height of the sponsorship scandal and pushed opposition days to the end of the calendar.
The Liberals – who were bitterly criticized at the time – call the parliamentary procedure a sign of weakness.
Ralph Goodale said the Tories fear an election while the economy is wobbly, while construction sites wait for federal stimulus cash, and while Employment Insurance reaches barely half of laid-off workers.
“Obviously the government is trying to push this out toward the end to limit their vulnerability in the House of Commons,” said Goodale, the Liberal House leader.
“They don’t have a plan to cope with the recession – so they want to limit the occasions upon which they are vulnerable to being defeated.”
Only three times since the start of the 20th century have elections been held in July or August, as party brass fear angering their own volunteers and voters by sending them to the polls during the holidays.
The Tories communicated their intention to the NDP earlier this month.
The government says no dates have been finalized, and that the parliamentary priority for the next few weeks will be getting legislation passed.
New Democrats say the move makes an imminent election highly unlikely, because the next-best option for triggering one would be in votes associated with the January federal budget.
And they say the Liberals would be hard-pressed to explain why they triggered an election over budget estimate votes – after they’d been supporting the budget since January.
“It would be very unusual for them to vote against the estimates at this point,” said NDP House Leader Libby Davies.
“Most people wouldn’t understand that. It would be, ‘What? the government fell on what?’ . . .
“It just doesn’t seem like the optics are right. And then we’d launch into an election in July, August, not even a year after we had one? I just don’t see how the forces are going to come together for them to do that.”
Five of this session’s eight scheduled opposition days were held earlier in the session, but the government appears to have slowed down the last three with the political winds shifting.
Davies says her party had been expecting its most recent opposition day last week or the week before – but it never came.
The political dynamic has been gradually turned on its head in recent months as the Liberals open a lead over all three of their rivals.
The Liberals went from being the head of a controversial opposition coalition, to propping up the government, to being the chief target of attacks from the Tories and Bloc Quebecois.
Now the Liberals are suggesting they might defeat the government. All bets are off, they say, unless the Conservatives extend EI benefits to more workers and get money flowing to infrastructure projects.
To force an election now the Liberals could table a non-confidence motion for a July campaign, vote down the budget’s main or supplementary estimates, or try pushing a censure motion through parliamentary committees into the House of Commons.
Goodale says all of those options remain a possibility – including voting down the budget bills.
“We haven’t at this stage ruled anything in or anything out. All options are open,” Goodale said.
To defeat the government, the Liberals would also need the support of both other opposition parties. With the Bloc and NDP both relatively low in the polls, neither is itching for an election but are also leery of becoming the Conservatives’ parliamentary ally.
