The scent of a yet another federal election is in the air, and Liberal Party Leader Michael Ignatieff was in Vancouver today to bait local reporters with a whiff of the campaign he’d like to run.

Ignatieff proposed a simple ballot question: “Who’s best placed to lead [Canada] into recovery?”

And his answer, to no one’s surprise, was that the Liberal Party has the best track record of economic leadership.

“We’ve got credibility,” he said. “We inherited a $42 billion deficit from Brian Mulroney, the last Conservative government. We dug the country out of it without raising taxes. We’re going to inherit a $50 billion-plus deficit from Mr. Harper, and we’ll dig the country out, too. We did it before, we’ll do it again.”

Ignatieff fielded less than a dozen questions during a short scrum with local news reporters at the Wosk Center for Dialogue. The former academic answered few inquiries, but took full advantage of each new topic as opportunity to attack the Harper record.

When asked what the Liberals have to gain by forcing an election the polls suggest Canadians do not want, Ignatieff stuck to his cue card:

“We’ve propped this government up after its near-death experience last December, and tried to provide stability for Canadians. But at a certain point, if you’re dealing with a government with this failing economic record, it becomes a matter of principle whether you can sustain it any longer.”

When another reporter suggested that answer was but a political ploy, Ignatieff replied:

“We’ve had 10 months of this government jamming us at every opportunity, refusing to cooperate, refusing to collaborate, constantly playing ‘my way or the highway,’ pretending to collaborate and then not actually delivering. At a certain point, I just think you have to stand and say, ‘Enough is enough. We can do better.’”

When asked specifically about British Columbia’s unpopular Harmonized Sales Tax, Ignatieff once again attacked Harper:

“The HST — the Harper Sales Tax — the thing that concerns us is that the Harper government has, during a time of recession and economic difficulty, basically pushed sales tax harmonization across the country, and is now walking away from it, saying, ‘It has nothing to do with us. It’s the provincial governments.’ We think that’s dishonest.”

However, Ignatieff’s comments also included a suggestion that a Liberal government would continue the HST: “The key question that we would need to look at in government is whether there are ways in which we can make this work better for British Columbians.”

In response to a query about what appears to be a recovering national economy, he said:

“A million and a half Canadians are looking for work. Bankruptcies are up 50 per cent. And we’re staggering along with a $50 billion deficit. The OECD says we’re going to have the slowest and most painful recovery of any country.

“The question is, Who can lead Canada into recovery? Into the new economy? Who’s best qualified to create the new jobs of tomorrow? Because, Canadians are uneasily aware that some of the jobs we’ve lost this past year — and we’ve lost close to 500,000 under Conservative rule — are not coming back. So who’s best placed to lead us into recovery? Who’s best placed to lead us into tomorrow? That’s going to be the question.”

Ignatieff answered his ballot question repeatedly, while deftly avoiding any details.

“All I can tell you about our plan on the deficit is: We’ve got credibility. We inherited a $42 billion deficit from Brian Mulroney, the last Conservative government. We dug the country out of it without raising taxes. We’re going to inherit a $50 billion-plus deficit from Mr. Harper, and we’ll dig the country out, too. We did it before, we’ll do it again.”

Monte Paulsen reports on politics and policy for The Tyee.