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Which of the parties will succeed in the attempt, if any, is hard to predict. On the other hand, predicting what issues they will put forward is a little easier. As far as the Liberals and Conservatives are concerned, they can be expressed in a single word: fear.

It is perennial Liberal strategy, already much in evidence, to appeal to fear of the Conservatives, especially when the Conservatives (as they usually are) are in opposition, and therefore to some extent an unknown quantity. This is specifically aimed at voters who might be tempted to vote NDP or Green. The message: only the Liberals can stop the Tories. Split the vote at your peril.

Meanwhile the Conservatives, if the polls remain as close as they are, are likely to run a fear campaign of their own, this one aimed at centrist voters, a.k.a. Conservative-Liberal switchers. In a minority Parliament, they will tell them, you risk being governed, not by the Liberals, but by the Liberals in some combination with the NDP or even the Greens. (Would this be the result? Who knows? Again, the operating principle is fear of the unknown.) Only a majority Tory government, they will say, can prevent this.

If past practice holds, the Conservatives will dress this up with a lot of dark rhetoric accusing the other parties of conspiring to “steal” the election after the votes are counted, which is constitutional nonsense: that’s how our system works. But the core message, that a Liberal minority government would depend on support from the parties to its left, has, in Henry Kissinger’s words, “the added advantage of being true.”

Those are, as I say, what the parties might each wish to make the ballot box question. The glory of democracy is that the voters are free to ignore them, and cast their votes on whatever other grounds they please: wise or wacky, profound or trivial. As they generally do.