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opinion

That the 15-year-old long-gun registry is the transfixing issue as Parliament resumes, with a vote to be held on Wednesday, offers a sad but telling commentary on the state of Canadian politics.

Here we have a sluggish economic recovery, an unemployment rate of 8 per cent, one of the industrialized world's worst climate-change records, bad poverty, aboriginal policy going forward and backward in equal measure, poor productivity and a bunch of other matters we might expect parliamentarians to debate.

Instead, we can see the next three months with depressing clarity: a government that lacks a new agenda, an opposition Liberal Party that is too scared to develop one, an NDP that has been turning itself upside down to find a compromise over the gun registry and a Bloc Québécois that bangs the same drum, day in and day out, and whose existence probably guarantees more minority governments.

We have a Parliament that provides more noise than light: Parties seldom compromise, the Conservatives are immensely and nastily partisan all the time and the Liberals oppose almost everything just for the sake of opposing. If you doubt what this session will look and sound like, just remember the name John Baird. He is the government's new House leader, in private a man of charm but in public the attack dog in whom Prime Minister Stephen Harper reposes such trust.

A taste of things to come arrived last week with Mr. Baird's suggestion that "Toronto elites" were behind the attempt to keep the gun registry, the inferred targets being Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP Leader Jack Layton, both from Toronto.

Whatever "Toronto's" view of the gun registry, the strongest support for it actually comes from Quebec and specifically from Montreal, where the horrible École Polytechnique killings occurred. But, then, the Conservatives are tone-deaf and politically dead in Quebec, which is among the reasons why the Harper-led party will never win a majority government. And we might remember that the continuation of the gun registry is supported by police chiefs across Canada (with a handful of exceptions) and the RCMP - hardly examples of the "Toronto elites."

In any event, 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 to them: being fiscal conservatives.

Of course, the government will target public-sector employees, since they have been doing well and, as a group, are easy whipping targets for red-meat conservatives and, indeed, many ordinary Canadians.

But restraint, per se, makes the creation of a creative agenda more difficult, and the Conservatives certainly need one.

They have been going nowhere politically for a long time, getting stronger among their existing base of supporters but not expanding beyond it. Indeed, the Conservatives managed something almost impossible in politics this summer: They turned almost every respectable and respected institution in the country against them, courtesy of the Prime Minister's personal decision to scrap the long-form census. When all you have going for you is the Sun newspaper chain, the Fraser Institute and the Alberta and Saskatchewan Conservative governments, you know how thin the support is.

A government without a compelling agenda and a Liberal Party apparently determined to oppose everything mean that the chances for a productive parliamentary session are slim.

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