The Sweet Release of a Spring Election

Put us out of our misery and drop the writ already.

The National Post’s Kelly McParland says there’s no good reason for the opposition to trigger an election next week, seeing as the Liberals are well behind in the polls and the majority of Canadians don’t want a spring campaign. These arguments, currently popular in the op-ed pages, are based on two very shaky assumptions. First, that election campaigns have no significant effect on a party’s popularity and therefore the Liberals have no hope of changing their fortunes on the campaign trail. Second, that popular appetite should be a primary factor in the timing of elections. That proposition becomes even more dubious when important relatively obscure issues that much of the public didn’t know existed (i.e. parliamentary privilege) are involved. Of course, the Liberals have their own unrelated, self-serving reasons for calling an election, namely to dump their under-performing leader.

CBC’s Scott Reid laments that nobody seems to care about the Conservatives’ alleged abuses of power, and blames this apathy on a media that are “disinterested in the awkward obligation of challenging authority,” and the opposition, who have failed to convince Canadians “that [Stephen] Harper's contempt of Parliament translates into a threat that resonates personally with the public.” Reid’s accusation that the media haven't taken Harper to task over Conservative ethics violations is bizarre, considering how easily it’s dismissed by a quick scan of the op-ed pages. And while it’s true that the opposition hasn’t capitalized on the issue, we in the Newsroom think that far too little responsibility is being placed on the Canadian public. If we plan to rely on opposition parties rather than our own judgment to define what constitutes an important ethics violation, we’re putting a lot of trust in a group of very self-interested people.

The Windsor Star’s Chris Vander Doelen says it’s time for an election, if only to shut the media up and end the current “non-stop media election fever accompanied by the non-stop invention of scandals du jour.” We admire his optimism but suspect it’s going to take a lot more than an election to stop politicians from bickering over pointless issues, or to prevent the media from writing about them doing it.