OTTAWA— Stephen Harper has been saying that co-operation in Parliament could avert an election in the near future, but the opposition leaders say the Prime Minister doesn’t seem interested in seeking any help in keeping his government afloat.

While Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was calling Harper the “Home Alone” Prime Minister in a speech on Tuesday, NDP Leader Jack Layton said he’s wondering why a politician who wants co-operation would release negative TV advertisements, attacking the people he says he wants to work with.

“It takes a pretty peculiar psychology to think that that makes sense,” Layton said in an interview from Nova Scotia, where he finished a nationwide tour before heading back to Ottawa for the NDP caucus retreat.

Liberal officials said Harper has only consulted Ignatieff a couple of times in the past two years, and they do not expect any conversations leading up to the reopening of Parliament next week or the budget, expected in late March.

Layton said he last spoke with Harper over the phone on Dec. 17, when the prime minister expressed an interest in following up to discuss what the NDP would want to see in the budget.

Layton has not put in a request to speak to Harper because it was the prime minister who asked him first.

“He knows where to find me,” Layton said. “Anytime he wants to talk to me, I’ve always been available.”

That meeting has yet to happen and the Chronicle-Herald reported Tuesday that Harper spokesman Andrew MacDougall said meeting Layton is unnecessary because the Conservative government is already aware of his demands.

“It’s just hard to see how you work with people, which is what Mr. Harper says he wants to do, if you don’t talk with them and if you take out attack ads against them,” Layton said. “How is that making Parliament work? Maybe he’s got some secret that I don’t know about, but it’s not how most Canadians would go about working together, that’s for sure.”

Ignatieff also says that the Conservatives’ own TV ads are an illustration of Harper’s style of co-operation.

“I don’t know whether you saw that, in the Chamber of Horrors ads they released last week, there was a very funny one,” Ignatieff told a packed room of MPs and future Liberal candidates on Tuesday. “It was supposed to be the positive ad? In which, there’s this kind of lonely guy, alone, working late at night… Lonely guy, working alone, kind of a ‘Home Alone’ guy? Hasn’t got any friends, you know? Doesn’t get out much, you know? I felt kind of sorry for him really.”

The ad, titled Rising to the Challenge, features Harper signing papers at his desk late at night.

“The other thing about that ad, that little image, is that he’s not listening to anybody,” Ignatieff said.

Sara MacIntyre, a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office, said on Tuesday: “Our government has been meeting with everyday, hard working Canadians about their priorities and concerns for the upcoming budget. Cabinet ministers have over one hundred such consultations set and already underway. And the Minister of Finance has in fact met with members of the NDP and Liberal about the budget already.”

Liberals spent Tuesday morning discussing whether they were ready for an election, with a party pollster telling them that they have many of the right messages for Canadians, but not enough people knowing about them.

Ignatieff, for his part, was deliberately ambivalent about election timing in his speech to his troops, saying: “This isn’t a question about organization or platform or planes or detail. All of that stuff sounds pretty good to me, actually. There’s another question, a deeper question. Are we ready to serve the people who put us here? Are we ready to fight for the Canada we love? Are we ready to fight for the Canadian family? What’s the answer to that?”

The packed room answered with a repeated chant of “Yes” and a standing ovation for Ignatieff.

Ignatieff says that while the Liberals aren’t seeking an election, they are keen to campaign on the issue of values.

Layton said he will “wait to see” what Harper does with NDP proposals such as eliminating the federal tax on home heating bills, reviving tax credits for energy-efficient home renovations, boosting income support for seniors, a national transit strategy and improving access to family doctors before deciding whether to support the budget.

That approach differs with how Layton handled the January 2009 budget, when he announced his party would vote against it before it was even tabled because he had lost confidence in Harper.

When asked what Harper had done to earn his “wait to see” approach this time around, Layton said the reason his party had announced its anti-budget intentions early was because the government had already leaked most of its details ahead of time.

But Layton had actually announced his intentions more than a week before the budget – and NDP finance critic Thomas Mulcair did so more than six weeks earlier – whereas senior government officials gave their unprecedented media briefing three days after Layton drew his line in the sand.

Layton will open his winter caucus retreat with a speech on the Senate, in which he will describe senators campaigning for their parties as a form of taxpayer-funded political subsidies.

The Conservatives are expected to campaign against public party financing and this will be a way for the NDP to frame their position as hypocritical, which has the added benefit of being an argument the Liberals cannot use as their own.

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