Angry in the Great White North

I guess there won't be an election anytime soon.  Liberal numbers are awful:

CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife said that Liberal Leader Stephane Dion was pushing for an election Tuesday, and was considering voting down the federal budget in March.

"He happens to believe that if Canadians see him in an election campaign, they'll like him and elect him as prime minister," said Fife.

"Of course, Liberal MPs have a different view of that. They believe that the party will get slaughtered in an election campaign, so they're telling him to please hold off and wait until it looks advantageous for the Liberal party to actually win."

How long can they wait?  Stephane Dion has put the Quebec by-election debacle behind him.  Jamie Carroll is a fading memory.  The Conservatives have been hit the AECL problem, the Schreiber nonsense, and the bad Bali press.

And the result is that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are flirting with a majority, while the Liberals drop an equal number of points.  In Ontario, the Conservatives are showing a solid 8-point lead. 

Heck, on the issues, 17% of respondents think the Liberals are best to deal with the environment, compared to 16% who think the Conservatives ought to be left in charge of that file -- in other words, the same.

Stephane Dion has been leader for just over a year, and he has lost the respect of Canadians on the single issue that best defined his leadership.

How much worse can it get for Stephane Dion?  National numbers are bad.  Ontario is slipping away.  Canadians see the Conservatives as a better choice on issues like the economy, Afghanistan, defence, managing government spending, and overall ethics.

When asked which party's values most reflected their own, 28 per cent said Conservative and 21 per cent Liberal.

Ouch!

And Stephane Dion has lost the environment issue!

Polls change, but this is the poll just before the critical budget vote.  Liberals will be looking at this poll and will realize that, in all likelihood, they will have to abstain from voting on the Conservative budget next week.  They can't go into an election behind Stephane Dion with numbers like these, not against a Conservative Party overflowing with cash. 

Another abstention?  But in December, Stephane Dion promised Liberal riding presidents that things would be different:

Federal Liberals rallied around their leader during a meeting of the party faithful in Montreal.

Just blocks from where Stephane Dion was elected party head, they came together to show their support for a leader who has had a relatively tumultuous first year at the helm.

"You're going to find two or three people here this weekend who have concerns," said Nova Scotia Liberal Party President Derek Wells.

"But is the party united behind Mr. Dion? Absolutely."

In Montreal, he was even talking about a possible spring election.

He said Liberal MPs have been forced to abstain from key confidence votes, allowing the Conservatives to push through key legislation, because Canadians were opposed to the idea of a third election in three years.

Now, he said, Canadians have had enough of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and are ready for a change.

Way to read the public mood.  I'm bringing this up to remind people what Stephane Dion was saying a mere ten weeks ago.

Already the NDP is battering the Liberals:

The NDP challenged Stéphane Dion's Liberals on Wednesday to oppose next week's Conservative budget, accusing the party of losing the "moral right" to call itself the official opposition while refusing to bring down Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority government.

Mulcair also ridiculed Dion for showing "incredible weakness" in giving indications earlier this week that his party might abstain from the budget vote, despite "boasting" in a Liberal pamphlet sent around the Ottawa area this week that the party was a "strong and principled alternative" to the Tories.

"That's what the Liberals say about themselves," Mulcair told reporters Wednesday in Ottawa. "We'll find out next week if they'll actually do anything about Harper's agenda."

More ridicule.  But besides that, there is the knowledge that the longer this goes on, the more likely the NDP will be able to sell this idea that Liberal votes ought to flow to the NDP, and not the other way around.

And yet, thanks to Stephane Dion's leadership, what choice do the Liberals have but to let this go on?

All this just hours after John McCallum said the Liberals would be holding a hard line against the Tory budget. 

The Conservatives have a difficult choice as well.  They can make the budget so unbearable that the Liberals will have to vote against it, or tolerate another Liberal retreat that delays what might have been a great election for the Tories.

But then I don't think the choice will be that difficult at all.  As much as people think the Conservatives want an election, they really don't.  They want to govern.  They'll present a responsible conservative budget, and let the Liberals choose between polls and principles.  The Conservatives want to take this mandate to 2009, because they know that Canadians will reward them for managing a minority government for an entire mandate.  And anyway, if there is an election, Stephane Dion will almost certainly be out of a job.  What Tory is in a rush to see Stephane Dion replaced?