Why We Need an Election Now!

Jeffrey Simpson wrote under a headline:

The Tories are running on empty, so don’t expect much progress:

... lost in the brouhaha over the tired issue of the long-gun registry, which the Conservatives see as a “wedge issue” in their rural Canadian base, is the more fundamental fact of Canadian politics: The government has run out of gas. The Economic Action Plan is ending, with few photo ops and announcements of spending left to be unveiled. Politically, there is no more juice to be squeezed from that source of spending, not that the juice already squeezed did the government much good, despite the manic tracking of those Economic Action Plan signs and the determination to milk each project politically.

Now, we enter slowly into a period of restraint, something unknown to the Harper Conservatives, who were big spenders before the recession and became whopping spenders during it. They cut taxes, drove up spending, paid down debt and wiped out surpluses before the recession, and the post-recession now finds the government in a fiscal hole. The Tories have to switch gears from showering money all over the country to saying no occasionally or, to put matters differently, to make a virtue of something previously unknown.

Fine. But Simpson also suggests that while the Harper government has run out of ideas, the Liberals are content to oppose everything. Aside from the fact that they are the opposition and we pay them to oppose, what exactly would Simpson want them to support?

We need an election now.