So far, no federal political leader or candidate I know of has ventured out on a limb to say it’s time for an election.

For the Harper government, the relentless attack ads on Michael Ignatieff have been working like a charm – hobbling the polling popularity of the Liberal leader. 

Prior to an election, there are no spending limits, and the Conservatives have been spending money like… well… Tories.  It helps that much of it is taxpayer money.

Just this winter, the Harper government has shelled out $26 million of public money for an advertising campaign to draw public attention to the now mostly completed infrastructure projects. You remember the infrastructure projects – the ones where the promotional billboards were occasionally worth more than the project itself. Where the Conservative MPs – including our own – delivered your taxpayer-funded government cheques with Conservative logos and their own names on them.

Despite the orgy of spending by this government, no pollster yet has really ventured the view that the Conservatives can enter the next election confident of the majority government they so relentlessly crave.

For the rest of the parties – mine included – there isn’t much that makes us eager to race to the polling booth.  The overriding view of pollsters, the media, and Canadians of all political stripes towards an election seems to be: “what would be the point?”  

Perhaps the point is this:  elections ask Canadians to look up from their busy lives and turn their attention to politics.  We lucky Canadians are not required to fill public squares for 18 days of protest, or stand in front of tanks, or duck the bullets of mercenaries to resist the power of authoritarian bullies. But we are asked, each election, to think critically: about our vote, about our country, and about the direction our democracy is heading.

We’re overdue for this discussion.

The direct victim of the Harper attack advertising strategy may be Michael Ignatieff.  But the most important victim is the accountability of Harper’s government to voters.   When the Opposition’s ability to hold the government accountable can be successfully undermined through a mass-media character assassination campaign, Canadian democracy is weakened. That weakened state allows arrogant behavior, badly designed policies, and irresponsible use of taxpayer’s money.  To pick just one example of this, consider the Conservative Government’s “tough-on-crime” policy agenda. 

The government has begun a range of legislative and operational changes designed to put more people in jail and keep them there longer, with fewer resources for treatment of root causes, rehabilitation and preparation of inmates for successful re-entry into society.  When confronted with the inconvenient fact that crime rates in Canada have been in steady decline, the government defies the Statistics Canada evidence with the red herring of “unreported crime.”

When confronted with the inconvenient fact that “tough on crime” programs in the U.S. have run up massive costs but failed spectacularly to improve public safety, the government attacks the Opposition for being “soft on crime.”   When asked to calculate for the public the financial cost of the “tough on crime” agenda – the government offers poorly supported and now discredited estimates, produced for political effect, not for serious policy debates.

Can the media hold Mr. Harper to account?  Not a chance. Like a banana republic dictator, Mr. Harper immediately restricted media access to the government when he took office. His cabinet ministers routinely decline to be interviewed in the media.  When they do speak, it’s in carefully pre-packaged sound bites.   And if the going gets too hot for that game, you can trust the government to trot out hired PR flacks (usually dubbed “Conservative strategists”)  to skillfully duck, dodge and dip around whatever topic the media wants to explore. 

Can the Senate hold Mr. Harper to account?  Not any more. Now that Mr. Harper has stacked the Senate with his loyalists, the Senate no longer acts as a house of sober second thought – it acts as an automatic veto mechanism  - rendering private members bills such as the environmental accountability act dead on arrival at the upper chamber. 

Can Parliamentary committees hold Mr. Harper to account? The Conservative members were actually given a “dirty tricks handbook” to instruct them how to foil and foul the work of these committees.

Can the leaders of government watchdog agencies hold Mr. Harper to account?  Hardly. One such leader (Remy Beauregard – Rights & Democracy) was harangued, literally, to death. Others – like Pat Stogran (Veterans Ombudsman) – were fired when they said inconveniently negative things about the government. Some – like Munir Sheikh (Chief Statistician of Canada) – were used against their will to support an unsupportable government decision (the canceling of the mandatory long-form census).

Can Elections Canada hold Mr. Harper to account? We’ll see. They have been pursuing him for years over the “in and out” scandal   - a $1.5 million fraud against taxpayers perpetrated to increase funds for a Harper advertising campaign which – ironically – promoted the transparency and accountability of the government that tried to pick our pockets to pay for it.

Can the Speaker of the House hold Mr. Harper to account? It doesn’t look like it. When the Speaker ruled recently that Mr. Harper and key government members have willfully lied to Parliament – an extraordinary, unprecedented ruling against a sitting government - Mr. Harper simply shrugged. 

So who’s left to hold Mr. Harper to account?  You are: each and every Canadian entitled to vote.

You don’t need to stand in a square for days on end. You don’t need to stare down a tank.  But it might be a good idea to use your vote just as soon as you can.  Democracy is in your hands. And in that respect, an election can’t come soon enough.

We deserve better.

 Kimberley Love

Federal Liberal Candidate

Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound