Ottawa Sun
Published: Saturday, April 9, 2005

Let Grits fry on hot seat a little longer

There will be no federal election this spring. I'm so confident of this prediction I'm willing to put up Sun publisher Rick Gibbons' house in a wager. (Trust me, Rick's house is bigger and better than mine and besides, my wife would kill me if I wagered with my house.)

Yesterday afternoon Justice Gomery partially lifted the publication ban on portions of former GroupAction executive John Brault's testimony at the sponsorship inquiry.

Now defeated Bloc, NDP and Tory candidates across the land are salivating at the prospect of a 36-day campaign where they can hurl accusations of corruption, fraud and criminal conspiracy at their Liberal opponents.

Many of these candidates (yours truly included) are miffed that their assertions of sponsorship corruption were swept off the table in last June's election. But unless there is testimony that links Paul Martin directly and unequivocally to the sponsorship scandal, don't worry about a spring, summer or fall of lawn signs and door-knocking candidates. Your deck and your cottage will be politician-free zones.

Here's why: The Liberals aren't going to engineer their own defeat given the volatile climate in which their minority government now finds itself. They won't pull a Joe Clark, circa 1979, period.

Turning to the Bloc, which would love to be pounding the pavement tomorrow, it simply doesn't have the Parliamentary clout to trigger an election. And with allegations/ revelations that the PQ separatists were in on the cash for contracts, kickback scheme as well, the BQ/PQ alliance is under some strain at the moment. As for the NDP MPs, as colourful as Jack Layton can be with his sound bites, they are mere spectators when it comes to the non-confidence power game.

Which leaves Stephen Harper holding the hammer, as others have noted. And he is not about to use it to pound any nails into the Liberal coffin anytime soon. Why would he? The Gomery inquiry is doing better than any single-issue-let's-focus-on-corruption plan devised by Tory strategists could ever hope to accomplish.

The next election campaign -- my money, and my house, not Gibbons', still rests on a winter or spring election in 2006 -- will be about corruption as well as the Liberal record in government. Neither prospect gives Liberal strategists a reason to smile.

As explosive and fundamentally disconcerting as the Gomery revelations are -- with much more to come from former bureaucrat Chuck Guite and ad exec Paul Coffin -- Mr. Harper and his Tories are still second choice for most Ontario voters. And a distant second choice where it matters most, in the 50 seats in and around Toronto and other urban cores such as London and Ottawa. These numbers have to move considerably before the government is brought down.

It is far better to continue to hammer away at the government for the rest of this session and then come back in the fall and wait for the full Gomery report to be released along with at least one (if not two) volume(s) of other issues to be documented in an auditor general's report.

During the summer months Mr. Harper should tour the country like he never has before and ensure that Canadians are comfortable with him, his party's more moderate platform (courtesy of the March Montreal convention) and a litany of solid candidates to be nominated across the country.

This waiting game also lets the government implode further and gives his Conservative Party portfolio critics more face time and experience in the House of Commons so Canadians can truly see the Conservatives as a government in waiting.

Nothing short of a majority Conservative victory has to be the goal for Tories next time out. The best way to ensure this is a 2006 vote where Liberals will be armed with their platform and Tories with theirs along with copies of the Gomery report to show to every single voter. The choice will be academic.