Why There Won't Be An Election

There’s been an increasing amount of speculation in the past few days that Stephen Harper could send the country into an election by asking the Governor General to dissolve Parliament. Despite what the story-starved media may be claiming, this is a baseless rumour.

Stephen Harper has two obvious reasons for keeping Parliament alive:

-He passed a law two years ago which brought in fixed election dates. This meant that unless the government were to be defeated in a confidence vote, an election would be held on the fixed date: Monday, October 19 2009. Of course, the law didn’t strip Harper from his constitutional right to call an election, but the public backlash associated with him breaking his own promise would be such that it would only make sense to do so if he were certain of a major victory.

-He isn’t certain of a major victory. The latest Harris-Decima poll puts him in a statistical tie with the Liberals, whom he trails in both Ontario and Québec.

The lesson to learn from this story is that political columnists (and bloggers like myself) have little material to draw from in the month of August, one of the reasons for which it wouldn’t be such a pity if the Ottawa Chamberfest were lengthened by a week.