Running for Canadian Grinch

So who's your Grinch of 2005? There is no shortage of candidates eager to win the award, with all four parties ready to kick over your Christmas tree and interrupt a parade of festive commercials with attack ads and vitriol that should have even the most cynical wishing for peace on earth and at least politeness towards men.

The coming weeks promise to be filled with all that is embarrassingly common on Parliament Hill, replete with name calling and personal attacks that will do little to sort out this country's problems. But it should work in the favour of at least three of the four main parties, an election not so much about issues, but self-interest and petty strategy; think Dr. Seuss meets Ipsos Reid.

For you don't have to look far beyond the latest offerings from EKOS and the like to see the potential of both Duceppe and Layton making significant inroads in their seat count, bringing a few more friends onboard the public payroll, and providing a little more clout when it comes to minority power broking. Anything that solidifies the Bloc's position with another referendum in the offing can only be good for your federal-funded separatist, and the sooner Jack Layton can get his wife Olivia Chow elected and moved up to Ottawa, the sooner he can cut those personal cell phone charges.

So when Smiling Jack talks about the importance of family in this election, believe him.

As for our free-spending, ever-promising Prime Minister, this election is nothing more than an end game that he set in motion long ago, with his risky but ultimately brilliant public mea culpa last April. Going on air in a humiliating, pleading, on-one-knee moment of begging for his job, Martin asked for time. Give him until the final Gomery report, and he'd call an election a month thereafter, he beseeched. And while he contends that this was a gesture of integrity, it was anything but.

The old saying goes that the public's memory has a two-week lifespan, which is just about how long the dip in Liberal polling numbers lasted following the preliminary Gomery report. While they may have suggested that it was merely a gesture to save the yuletide feast from the chatter of electioneering, the fact is that the opposition's proposal of calling the election in January would have had us going to the polls two weeks after the tabling of Gomery's final tome, just when the Liberals would be most vulnerable.

So while Martin may not be getting his memory-dulling post-Gomery wait period, one suspects he's tickled pink to be avoiding the second report altogether, Kris Kringle be damned.

The odd man out is Stephen Harper, whose rush to go out campaigning instead of carving the roast beast is as perplexing as it is foolhardy. The Conservative cry over corruption is falling on increasingly numbed ears, especially in Ontario. They are not only making no inroads, but face the distinct possibility of losing ground. The Conservative platform is not one of new ideas, but of attack and playing the dishonesty card, and as any good bridge player will tell you, trying to win any hand with only one trump requires a considerable amount of finesse, something Harper does not possess in great abundance.

The only rationale that makes any sense at all is that Harper is deliberately committing Christmas suicide, perhaps weary of holding the reins to a party that is going nowhere fast, while he faces the slings and arrows of a divided country that makes little sense to him. It's a sad way to spend Christmas, but for a party in desperate need of a makeover, it may prove cleansing.

Which leaves you, I, and the rest of Whoville having to hold our noses one more time to vote in another minority government little different from the last. But this time, don't expect the Grinch to find his heart, or for it to grow three times its size over this long, cold election campaign.

Whoever wins will still be the Grinch, long after the snow melts.