BADDECK, N.S.—Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff says he expects Prime Minister Stephen Harper to wage a campaign of fear in the next election—especially whipping up fears about an opposition coalition.

“That’s how Mr. Harper governs. Let’s make you very scared of someone you were never scared of before—the census taker. Let’s make you very scared of the coalition. Let’s make you scared of pretty well everybody,” Ignatieff told reporters as he wrapped up his party’s summer retreat this week at a Nova Scotia resort.

“That’s the strategy, that’s the style of the Conservative government. I don’t want to appeal to fear. I want appeal to hope and optimism.”

Harper has been sending signals in recent weeks that he will be using the next election campaign to argue that a Conservative majority is a better choice than a potential coalition of the opposition parties—as Canada almost had shortly after the last election in 2008, when the Liberals and New Democrats struck a short-lived deal to oust Harper.

Ignatieff says he does not believe that Canadians are afraid of coalitions and that he’ll be deliberately presenting the Liberal party as a grand coalition party to voters.

“My answer on the coalition is the ‘big red tent,’” Ignatieff said. “We are the coalition. We are the big, broad, inclusive tent that wants to get all Canadians in, who want progressive and responsible government. And that’s the Canadian approach.”

All summer, while conducting his 40,000-kilometre journey across Canada, Ignatieff said he was running into Progressive Conservatives who were uneasy with Harper’s brand of Conservatism, and also Greens, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois supporters who realize their parties can’t form government.

The Liberal leader says he’ll be presenting himself to voters as a politician who “plays well with others”— as his school report cards used to say— because that also presents a stark contrast between himself and Harper.

“Canadians are tired of a politics of division, a politics of wedges, a politics in which the government says ‘Let’s divide urban and rural Canada on the gun registry. Isn’t that a clever thing to do,’” said Ignatieff. “In fact, the blue tent is a narrow tent.”

Liberals announced on Wednesday that Ignatieff’s road show will be extended throughout the fall in a series of weekly town hall meetings across Canada. They are being called “Open Mike”—a play on Ignatieff’s own first name and, again, a deliberately drawn contrast to the Prime Minister, who they call “Closed Steve.”

Liberals have been making much of the idea that while Ignatieff was out all summer talking off-the-cuff to Canadians and taking questions unscripted from the crowd, Harper was either out of sight or engaged in heavily stage-managed public appearances.

All these Liberal attempts to draw sharp distinctions—fear versus hope, open versus closed, right wing versus the moderate middle—are part of the larger effort to lay the groundwork for the next election campaign. Harper appears to have been doing some of the same thing recently, with his frequent mentions of a potential opposition coalition and the need for Conservatives to form a stable majority.

Since Canada’s so-called “coalition crisis” of late 2008, which was only averted when Harper shut down Parliament and won a second chance to get his government up and running, Britain and Australia have held elections that produced a need for coalition-style governments.

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Ignatieff did not want to get drawn into questions on Wednesday about whether this may have made Canadians more open to the idea of coalitions than they were in 2008, when Conservatives waged a massively successful PR campaign against the whole idea of Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois co-operating to form government.

“Australia is Australia and Britain is Britain and Canada is Canada.... We have a very different political system,” Ignatieff said, noting that Canada has regional and linguistic diversity that aren’t present in other countries. “So we can always listen respectfully and watch respectfully what’s happening in Australia and Britain, but we’ve got our own choices to make.”

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