What is Harper's Spending Strategy?

Perusing the blogosphere I came across a piece from Cathie From Canada. Now the gist of her post is that with the Tories eliminating the climate change group of Environment Canada and focusing more power in the PMO. What I'm writing about is something that got me thinking at the end of her post where she writes:
"Maybe the opposition parties should just pass next week's budget - and let Harper start explaining why he isn't actually capable of fulfilling all of the promises he has made."
This got me thinking that all this spending might just be bluster in the hopes that the opposition forces an election on the budget.

My reasoning goes like this: The Conservatives are currently acting out of character and are currently on a binge of spending that would make a Liberal blush in shame. Much of this spending is on programs that the Liberals initiated and were subsequently can celled by the Tories when they took power. Now the Tories can only hide for so long the fact that they're just resurrecting Liberal policy so the long term electoral success of such a plan is fleeting. Add to this the fact the Conservatives don't give a whit about the environment, and would do anything to eliminate environmental regulation that makes it more expensive to do business and what they're doing look like simple electioneering, which it is. Now Harper hasn't had a road to Damascus conversion on the environment, but he does know that Canadian voters can be bribed with their own money. So he announces a flurry of spending in the hopes that the budget in which this spending is approved gets defeated by the opposition. That way Harper hopes to do three things.

First Harper gets to go to the polls and blame the opposition for it. After all, with an election just over a year ago, no one really wants another one and there could be fall out for the party that forces one. If Harper can engineer it so that the opposition takes the fall for the election call, he may be able to pick up a few votes here and there from the disgruntled, election-weary voters our there. Given the current polling climate, every vote outside of Alberta counts and Harper needs them all.

Second Harper also gets to blame the opposition for being environmentally unfriendly since they've just defeated the government's budget that had billions of dollars to help save the environment. After all, if you don't give Stephen a majority, all the goodies he's announced may not come to pass. This is false of course, since all the goodies Harper's been announcing are simply a re-hash of programs announced by the Liberals and a Liberal government would be unlikely to cancel those programs. In this Harper is hoping that the voter won't realize this and vote for his party again. He's also hoping that the voter will forget how he acted during the first year of his government.

Finally, Harper is hoping that having had his budget defeated that he will win a majority government. Why? Because with a majority he can do what he damn well pleases of course. With a majority, Harper can renege on all his spending promises with impunity basically thumbing his nose at the people who voted for him because of the promised spending. I believe that this is the deep down reason for the spending. Basically, announce it, have it defeated in the budget, get a majority, then safely go back on the promised spending so it never gets spent. Through the spending announcements and the budgetary process Harper is trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wants the votes that massive spending can bring, but he also doesn't want to spend the money. By engineering a budget defeat and the ensuing election, Stephen is banking on a majority so that he can ignore his promises.

Of course, if this is indeed his plan, it can all come collapsing down around him if the opposition fails to play ball and pass the budget. Assuming there's nothing hugely controversial in the budget, it could pass easily with Liberal support. The event of the budget passing then becomes Harper's worst nightmare. He now would have to spend all that money he's been throwing around and to help fund things he thinks don't need funding. Even worse, when the election finally does come, people are unlikely to remember all the money he was throwing around and he wouldn't be able to blame the opposition for stopping the money. With this in mind I suspect that Harper will throw something in the budget so horrendous that the opposition would have no choice but to vote against it. He needs to do this or else he's not going to get the election he wants under the terms he wants.

So the way I see it the opposition should call Harper's bluff. Make him spend the cash on things he doesn't want then wait a few months for people to forget that he's spent the money. Then call the election. Harper would be unable to make more spending announcements that people would believe, since the budget has already come down. The opposition can say that they tried to work with the government on the environment and helped provide the funding. Further Harper and his cabinet would be likely to tell yet more obvious lies and erode their credibility even more. I think that for the opposition this would be the best strategy, give Harper and the Tories plenty of rope then let the Tories hang themselves.