I was in the House last Wednesday when we learned the reason Mr. Harper wouldn’t be paying Mme Jean a visit anytime soon had less to do with differences in policy, but rather that Canadians apparently don’t want an election.

Imagine, the criteria for having an election is not whether need one, but if we want one.

My son doesn’t want a haircut this weekend either, but I am neither waiting for those conditions to turn any more favourable than I am waiting for a further cut in the GST. He needs a haircut.

As strategies come and go I know what Mr. Dion is doing; borrowing a page from Lucien Bouchard’s strategy handbook vis-à-vis waiting for winning conditions before pulling the trigger.

Question is, will the strategy be any more successful for Mr. Dion than it was for Mr. Bouchard? The answer to that question isn’t quite so clear and appears to change daily.

On the one hand, Mr. Dion isn’t fooling anyone. I can think of no better way to convince Mr. Dion Canadians want an election than to put a poll under his nose showing he, not Mr. Harper, is hovering around the 40% range. If this were the case Mr. Dion would suddenly have a very different sense of the public’s desire for an election. At least Mr. Bouchard called it for what it was, even if “it” never came.

Unfortunately for the current Liberal leader, a favourable figure in the 40% range isn’t in the cards for a while, or possibly ever. 

On the other hand, history is pretty consistent whereby the pendulum does indeed swing both ways. Is it only a matter of time before the cocksure Conservatives run amuck?

In her most recent column Gesture falls flat in Quebec, the ever-intuitive Chantal Hebert defines how in Quebec the cracks in Mr. Harper’s armor could begin begin surface. Do average Quebecers care more about, out of which pocket money is spent in their province than do voters in the ROC? Probably. But is there enough tissue around that bone to catapult Mr. Duceppe back into 50 seat territory? Probably not. Mr. Harper is, very clearly, gambling there isn’t, or that the issue can be sufficiently confused under the guise of other goodies.

There remains, in my view, only one area in which Mr. Dion stands any chance; the Environment. And that happens to be the area in which Mr. Dion is most comfortable and Mr. Harper is not.

Mr. Dion knows he can’t bring the government down on say, raising the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16. In that regard, Andrew Coyne was right, the Throne speech was “bullet proof.” My hunch too, is Mr. Flaherty’s imminent mini-budget will also be laced with the kind of traps Mr. Dion believes – in his own mind – he has thus far avoided. On the environment file, however, Mr. Dion has legitimate wiggle room, and he doesn’t need time to prove it.

The time Mr. Dion is buying is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, time gives him what he needs to try and get what ducks remain in a row. It also raises the short term spectre that Mr. Harper could, but is unlikely, to falter. More to the point it gives him the chance to try and carve out a piece of the environment turf he can call his own, and try, once again, to be perceived as that issues’ champion.

However, every minute of every day that passes Mr. Dion makes it more-and-more difficult for himself to explain, in a campaign, why he’s suddenly so opposed to issues he didn’t object to on-the-spot.

Mr. Bouchard’s winning conditions consisted of waiting for a time when his future vision and current public opinion could one day be beat. For Mr. Dion it’s hoping the two shall never meet.