Prime minister to call general election Sunday: sources

OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper will launch a federal election campaign Sunday with a visit to the Governor General, sources have told The Canadian Press.

Harper is set to meet with Michaelle Jean at 9 a.m. ET and ask her to dissolve Canada's 39th Parliament, with an election on Oct. 14, the sources said.

Although the call violates the spirit of Harper's own fixed-election date law that sets the next vote a year from now, the prime minister will argue that he has lost the confidence of Parliament.

The Conservatives, elected Jan. 23, 2006, go into this campaign having managed the third-longest parliamentary minority in federal history - and the longest since the 1920s.

Harper's Conservatives ended almost 13 years of Liberal government on Jan. 23, 2006, by claiming 36 per cent of the popular vote.

The prime minister was huddling with his cabinet Thursday for a pre-election meeting in Meech Lake, Que.

A number of strategic concerns appear to have inspired Harper to head to the polls early.

With the economy wavering, the election could already be over by the time the government posts its next set of fiscal statistics on the quarterly deficit or surplus.

That eliminates the possibility of Harper's campaign being torpedoed by headlines about an unexpected federal deficit.

An immediate campaign would also cancel byelections set for next week. It would allow for a vote to be held before a Francophonie leaders' summit in Quebec City.

And, perhaps more importantly, it would conclude before the U.S. presidential election in November.

One of the U.S. candidates - Barack Obama - had his campaign undermined by the leak of a Canadian diplomatic memo last winter.

That incident would be more likely to resurface on the Canadian campaign trail if Obama happened to be elected president before Canadians voted.

An election on Oct. 14 would pre-empt that possibility.

But it would also place the prime minister in conflict with his own words two years ago, when he hailed his fixed-election law as a key plank in his promise to reform Canadian democracy.

"Fixed election dates stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar," he said soon after taking office in 2006.

"Hopefully in the next election we can run on our record and we won't need the manipulation of the electoral calendar."