PM eager to escape his own trap

[CHIMO]

There's a scene in Blazing Saddles, the wildly incorrect Mel Brooks western, that the Prime Minister would recognize and the rest of the country should reconsider. In it, the frontier's unwelcome first black sheriff holds a gun to his own head to escape racist settlers. Having successfully taken himself hostage, the sheriff muses; " Ooh, baby, you are so talented. And they are so dumb."

Twenty-four years after the movie debut, enter Stephen Harper, stage far right. By threatening his own minority, the Prime Minister is neutralizing another nasty situation. Not long after sanctimoniously promising to end the common practice of prime ministers forcing elections for partisan advantage, Harper is escaping his own trap and setting the scene for a snap fall campaign favouring Conservatives.

All of that will change long before the fixed election date Harper promised during the last campaign and then legislated for October 2009. If he obeys his law, or lets the opposition set the election date, Harper will face an electorate worried about jobs, apprehensive about increasing Asian violence and instability, and knowing that Americans have either opted for Barack Obama and the hope of sweeping change or John McCain and a more collaborative model of the George W. Bush status quo.

What's most surprising about the Prime Minister's gambit is that it wasn't more widely anticipated. Over lunch a year ago, a senior Ottawa insider predicted with absolute certainty that the boss wouldn't allow the opposition to defeat the government. That confidence – confidence that now seems eerily prescient – flowed from close observation of a Prime Minister obsessed with control.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/482559#

So plan B has been there all the time.

Time for the Liberals to pull out plan C. Maybe a referendum on Carbon Tax or something else...