So I’ll make some comments, probably enough for you to get an idea of my leanings—I was about to add, “but I won’t make any prediction”, but as you probably know by now, I don’t have that kind of control.

It’s an interesting election, ignoring the issues of the tremendous cost and whether we really needed one or not. There are some interesting personalities in the mix. I think more than many elections, the focus is on the national leaders, and a lot of local ridings will tilt from the desire to have one leader over another.

I have to say that I don’t like Stephen Harper, and my voting might end up as more of an “anything but Harper” than the real supporting of another party. I think that if he gets the majority that he desperately wants, it will only happen the once. Harper, under minority conditions, only lets us see glimpses of his true personality and true agenda. Under majority conditions, he can basically push through almost any piece of legislation he wants (particularly with a senate stuffed with his choices, all of who have realized by now which side of the bread has a lot of butter). I think we will see a lot of movement to the political right, a huge amount of control, and very little input from parliament other than as a clearing house formality. Members of other parties will be the nuisances he has to put up with, and members of his own party will toe the line or find themselves dispatched to a political Siberia.

Harper shows enough glimpses of this during the campaign: paranoia and control beyond the imaginations of journalists covering his trek. At his Halifax visit, reporters and uninvited people were kept thirty feet away behind a metal fence, while loyal (and thoroughly checked) supporters were seated in front. Reporters clustered there were allowed two questions. The opposition later was able to make hay with the Ontario incident where two young women were strong-armed out of a public gathering for Harper when it was discovered (just the fact that staffers too the trouble to look for such information gives me serious concerns) that they had a photograph taken with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff on their Facebook pages.

Green Leader Elizabeth May disclosed in an interview that she was shocked with Harper’s behaviour at the television debate in the last election. The candidates were told that they could not bring anything into the debate room, that there would be water, index cards for making notes, and a pen on short tables beside each. May looked over to find that Harper had a nice set of typed index cards (there was no sign of his having brought a typewriter in with him… but I jest). Apparently Harper either thought that the rules did not apply to him, or he (and staffers) were willing to take the chance on being censured for this breach. In either situation, it spoke to his need, like the limited questions from reporters he always enforces in press conferences, to leave nothing to chance—everything must be scripted—“controlled” is the far better term.

I’d like to say that I’m more impressed with Ignatieff, but that would be a lie, though I lack the abundance of examples to prove his unsuitability. He is supposed to be an “intellectual”, a “cerebral” thinker, mainly because of his career as a writer and university professor. I see little evidence of this, other than the fact that he’s stilted and uncertain in dealing with the common man. If he’s a highly gifted, cerebral man typical of the Harvard instructors, it has certainly become easier to land a job there. I regarded Pierre Trudeau as cerebral, but I’ve seen little of that in politicians since. Trudeau seemed able to stand back from the games of parliament and pop out the occasional tongue-in-cheek comment that revealed his perceptions were well above the spitting matches at the front desks, or occasionally showed his distain (as in the famous “fuddle-duddle” comment) for the games played by the men we elect, pay well, and pension off even better.

Ignatieff seems to be playing a role; I see a surface political performer, not great at that act, but (and this is common to most politicians) I don’t see the true man underneath. He lashed out with a speech last week where he called on Canadians to “Rise up! Rise up!”, a tirade that prompted the Conservatives to label him as “screeching” and “losing it entirely”. Certainly a predictable response from that side, since Harper is so controlled that one commentator said he thought he was attempting to hypnotize him with his robotic responses in the debates, seldom looking at his opponents as he spoke to where he felt the cameras were positioned. Word was that the intent of campaign strategists for the debates was to keep Harper cool, calm, and guaranteed to never lose his temper. There seemed to be great concern about him losing his temper, something I wasn’t aware he had on that level. Perhaps had he lost his temper, he would have attempted to banish them all from the kingdom, and would have become frustrated when no guards rushed in to do his bidding… or perhaps we would all be surprised when they did. But I’m onto Harper again—I told you the stories were better there. I felt that the “Rise up! Rise up!” was also a performance on Ignatieff’s part, not a true demonstration of reaching his limits with the indifference of the Canadian voters.

One person I take to be honest with his feelings and to be playing little of a role, frankly, is Gilles Duceppe. Unfortunately his party is not running other than in Quebec, and their ultimate intention of breaking up Canada makes The Bloc a rather poor choice.

Jack Layton is at times admirable. He plays less of a role, though it is still apparent, and seems to have the welfare of the man on the street foremost in his mind. Whether he would bankrupt the nation with a mandate to govern remains to be seen. Unfortunately, more than ever before, his NDP is caught between the two major parties, and will be squeezed out either by the desire of some to give Harper a majority and end this need to cooperate in government (something that seems alien to our parliamentary process), or by the desire to defeat Harper at any cost and not waste votes on the NDP. The New Democrats have always faced that barrier of “not able to form the government”, a perception that takes one win to erase, as it has been erased in Nova Scotia when an NDP majority government was surprisingly elected almost two years ago. Forever after, they will have to be taken seriously in this province, though so far their reign here has been so troubled that many feel they will lower the chances of NDP candidates being elected federally!

I don’t know if I can throw in much on Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party. She and her party, in any situation, would have the proverbial snowball’s chance, but in the time of a Harper-stays-or-goes election, the perception of her ranks being made up of left-over hippy tree huggers doesn’t arouse a lot of support, despite her being intelligent, guileless, and probably the only party leader that you would really like to share a Tim’s with and get to know.

Polls come out on an almost daily basis showing the popular vote, and how little it has changed in the weeks of campaigning. But we all know what dogs do to polls. Popular vote indications are really only meaningful for a country that uses a different form of election, like Australia’s Preferential Voting, and the pollsters should know this. Our “first past the pole” (the other pole) method of election can widely skew the appearance of popular support. Many who realize this feel this election is much closer, at least between Conservative and Liberal, than people are led to think.

For example, humour me for a moment with the math. Suppose, on a small scale, we have four little ridings, with 100 voters in each. In Riding #1, 99 people vote Conservative—they of course win this seat. In each of the other three, 51 persons vote Liberal, and 49 vote PC. The Liberals win all three. Popular vote? Add them up: PC, 99 + 49 + 49 + 49 = 246 votes. Liberals 1 + 51 + 51 + 51 = 154 votes. In percentages, the PC’s had 61.5% of the popular vote, the Liberals only 38.5%. But the Liberals won three seats to the Conservative’s lone seat! While this is an exaggerated little example, the math is perfectly correct, and with strong Harper support in some areas of the West, there could be concentrations there that skew the results much like my example, while seats in places like powerful Ontario are won by the Liberals with narrow margins.

So… I predict? Unfortunately, Harper minority again. More use of the dirty word “Coalition”.

The leaders? If Ignatieff holds his leadership position for six months, you will see if he goes back on his claim to not enter any coalitions, a claim that he was forced to make when Harper used the C word as a powerful tool in the opening weeks. You will also see a PC party that has reached its limits with Harper’s inability to get a majority, and there will be another “night of the long knives” like the one that ended Diefenbaker’s career.

I could be wrong. It has happened. (Much too frequently in politics)