OTTAWA -- Liberal leader Stephane Dion said Prime Minister Stephen Harper looked him in the eye and told him there will be an election this fall.
The two men met at 24 Sussex Drive Monday for a meeting to see if there was a way to make the next session of Parliament more productive.
But Dion emerged after about 20 minutes and called the meeting a “charade.”
”I wanted to tell him that face-to-face,” Dion told reporters.
The prime minister now calls Parliament dysfunctional -- even though most of his government’s bills had been sailing smoothly to passage when the summer recess began in June.
Harper is now expected to dissolve Parliament this week and set an election date for Oct. 14.
Such a move would violate the spirit of Harper’s fixed-election-date law, one which sets the next vote in late 2009 barring extraordinary circumstances.
Dion says Harper’s decision to ignore his own law touches on the issue of trust and he intends to make it an issue in the coming campaign.
”It’s unacceptable for a prime minister not to respect the rule of law,” Dion said.
Dion speculated that a faltering economy is behind Harper’s decision.
”He doesn’t want Canadians to have too much time to see how much he is ill-prepared to face the economy,” Dion said.
But an election would also offer Harper some political advantages.
With the economy wavering, the election could already be over by the time the government posts its next set of fiscal statistics on the quarterly deficit or surplus.
It would also cancel byelections set for next week, allow for a vote to be held before a Francophonie leaders’ summit in Quebec City, and conclude before the American presidential election in November.
One of the U.S. candidates -- Barack Obama -- had his campaign undermined by the leak of a Canadian diplomatic memo last winter.
That incident would be more likely to resurface on the Canadian campaign trail if Obama happened to be elected president before Canadians went to the polls.
An election on Oct. 14 would pre-empt that possibility.
But it would also place the prime minister in conflict with his own words two years ago, when he hailed his fixed-election law as a key plank in his promise to reform Canadian democracy.
”Fixed election dates stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar,” he said soon after taking office in 2006. “They level the playing field for all parties. The rules are clear for everybody.
”Unless we’re defeated or prevented from governing, we want to keep moving forward to make this minority parliament work over the next three-a-half years,” Harper said.
”Hopefully in the next election we can run on our record and we won’t need the manipulation of the electoral calendar.”
--The Canadian Press
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