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If Prime Minister Harper abides by his own law, a year from now we will be in a federal election campaign.

In the past, however, the Prime Minister has not shown much regard for his own fixed elections law. He pulled the plug early in 2008, for instance, claiming he could not get anything done in a minority Parliament. His Conservatives were re-elected, but still with a minority.

This time, Stephen Harper might at least have a plausible excuse for going to the polls early.

There are two provincial elections now scheduled for the fall of 2015: Manitoba’s in early October and Saskatchewan’s in early November. The federal election is fixed for October 19. The election acts of both provinces provide for postponement until the spring of 2016 in the case of an overlapping federal election. But Harper could argue, early in 2015, that rather than inconvenience the good folks of Manitoba and Saskatchewan he will move the federal election forward.

That would mean Canadians would get to vote for a new federal Parliament more or less four years after the previous time, in May of 2011.

Harper might be tempted to call an election in February or March of 2015, right after unveiling what he and Finance Minister Joe Oliver will characterize as a good news budget. The next budget — or as the Conservatives prefer to call it, the “economic action plan” — will almost certainly be the first one in more than six years to show a surplus. And Oliver has just as much as promised that he intends to use that surplus to hand out tax cuts to deserving Canadians.

And so it is no surprise that with the House of Commons due to resume sitting on September 15 we find ourselves in nearly full-throttle election mode.

The government will continue to bring forward legislation, and there is much still in the pipeline. To name only one major item: the Conservatives’ proposed new legislation on prostitution is yet to pass. However, from here on in, federal politicians and political operatives will be almost entirely preoccupied with preparing for the coming election.

Being the Official Opposition does not always get you the media’s respect

The mainstream media, following the public opinion pollsters, will almost certainly portray the run-up period to the next election as a Trudeau vs. Harper contest. Somehow, the facts that Tom Mulcair is the Leader of the Opposition and that his party, the NDP, has well more than twice the seats of Trudeau’s Liberals seem to have escaped their notice.

Few would argue that the NDP has not worked diligently as the Official Opposition since 2011, pushing back as hard as it could against the governing Conservatives’ undemocratic stratagems.

It is extremely difficult to get Stephen Harper’s one-party-rule gang to pay any heed to anything the opposition might suggest, but the NDP’s dogged determination did succeed in a few cases. Perhaps most notable of those was the case of the Fair Elections Act. That oxymoronically named Act is still a terrible piece of legislation. But it is not quite as bad since the Conservatives agreed to a few key changes — changes for which the Official Opposition critic Craig Scott fought long and hard.

Justin Trudeau and his caucus played virtually no role in that fight, aside from cheering from the sidelines. In Trudeau’s case, he was absent for much of the parliamentary and committee debate on Fair Elections. A similar tendency to absenteeism cost then Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff dearly in the 2011 campaign. It does not seem, so far, to be hurting the current Liberal leader whom one columnist dubbed “the boy wonder.”

In the middle of August, the Globe and Mail‘s Campbell Clark quoted a Quebec media researcher, Jean-François Dumas, who reported that in the first half of 2014 there was 69 per cent more coverage of Trudeau than Mulcair in English Canadian media. Trudeau also got a better deal from the French media. His margin over the Leader of the Official Opposition was only 17 per cent.

The political agenda during the first half of 2014 included the thorny issue of temporary foreign workers, Canada Post’s plan to cut home delivery of mail, the Conservatives’ ill-fated and half-hearted First Nations education reform bill, another of Harper’s patented omnibus budget implementation bills, the Conservative government’s decision to cut health care for most refugees, and the aforementioned Fair Elections and prostitution legislation.

On all of those, and much more, the Official Opposition NDP did almost all of the heavy lifting in keeping the government to account and proposing constructive alternatives. In the House, in committees (where serious legislative work is supposed to happen, although too often the majority Conservatives thwart the process) and in media outreach the NDP was invariably active and focused.

The third party Liberals do not have the same opportunity to make their voice heard as the Official Opposition. They only get one seat on House committees, for example. And the Liberals do have a number of knowledgeable and effective caucus members. Ralph Goodale, Marc Garneau, Kirsty Duncan and Ted Hsu come to mind. But on the whole one gets the impression the once (and future?) natural governing party does not think the day-to-day work of Parliament is of much interest.

The Liberal strategy is that of the permanent election campaign — a campaign almost exclusively focused on their A-list celebrity leader. It is the politics of image, affect and attitude, almost completely without substance. The same Jean-François Dumas who provided the Globe with media coverage statistics says that Trudeau is “the first Canadian political example of ‘peopleization,’ where persona gets more attention than what someone does.”

We’re in the age of pure celebrity, it seems, and how do you counter that?

Negative Conservatives; policy-focused New Democrats

The Conservatives have chosen the tactic of political judo. They run ads mocking Trudeau’s flaky persona, trying to turn his greatest advantage against him.

At the same time, Harper’s folks narrow-cast to their angry and resentful base, focusing on divisive and negative policies, notably in the area of justice and law enforcement. If they can keep their hard core motivated and committed for the time-being, Conservatives reason, a good news budget in 2015 will allow them to pick up enough of the floating, uncommitted vote to get them the bare plurality of votes they need to win another majority.

It is a fairly cynical approach. But has worked in the past. Indeed it is the classic United States Republican approach. Focus on what divides voters not what unites them. Then, work as hard to suppress voters on the other side as to motivate your own voters.

Tom Mulcair and the NDP would be ill-advised to try a similar strategy from the left. Attacking Trudeau personally would likely seem churlish and petty. In any case, the Conservatives already occupy that territory.

Trying to match Trudeau and the Liberals in image politics would also be pointless. Trudeau’s brand of “peopleization” cannot be created by image specialists and spin doctors. It is a kind of mysterious alchemy that just somehow happens.

The NDP has no choice but to focus on substance. The Official Opposition has been doing that in the House, in reaction to the Conservative agenda. Now it is time for Mulcair and his colleagues to start laying out, in as much detail as possible, how they would govern Canada.

We do know that an NDP government would roll back the age for Old Age security to 65, maintain home delivery of mail and institute an inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls. That’s a beginning. Over the coming months, the party might want to flesh out detailed and concrete policies on taxes, trade, employment insurance, the environment, poverty reduction, criminal justice, resource development and manufacturing.

There is no guarantee that taking such a course will help win the election. But it will definitely help raise the level of political discourse. And that in itself is a worthy goal.  

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...