“Now Might Be a Good Time for Harper to Turn Over a New Leaf”

The pundits offer a little friendly advice to the embattled prime minister.

With the Conservatives stinging from House Speaker Peter Milliken’s contempt of Parliament rulings against them this week, the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert says the only way Stephen Harper can avoid an election is by making a pact with the NDP, a prospect she gauges as extremely unlikely. Not only is there little time to weave NDP demands into the March 22 budget but Harper has learned from Paul Martin, who appeared weak when he went begging to the NDP to prop up his minority government. And besides, as Hébert points out, neither Tories’ nor the NDP’s core supporters would welcome a deal between the ideologically opposed parties. Election, here we come!

The National Post editors love to poke fun at their liberal counterparts at the Toronto Star for being hopelessly naïve about the politicians they support, but the Post is equally out to lunch with this editorial about Harper. The Tories’ apparent contempt for Parliament likely doesn’t warrant an election, says the Post, but “if Mr. Harper avoids an election, he should be chastened by Mr. Milliken's findings … now would be a good time for Mr. Harper to turn over a new leaf.” If the prime minister were actually capable of being chastened by anything, he probably would have shown it by now.

The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson writes that an election this spring would be marred by a terribly unrepresentative electoral map and a terribly over-representative debate format. As he has argued before, Simpson says Canada’s distribution of electoral seats is heavily slanted towards rural ridings (which have many fewer voters than urban ones) and small provinces, and needs to be overhauled. He also takes umbrage with the nationally televised debates that feature five candidates, disproportionately favouring parties that have no chance of forming the government and one, the Bloc, that doesn’t even field candidates outside of Quebec. “What’s needed is a set of rules that will make the debate intelligible to viewers,” Simpson says, “allowing them to see more of the leaders who might be prime minister.”