OTTAWA - When the prime minister starts wandering around his office on camera with a Beatles mug in hand, can the blue sweater-vest be far behind?
It's beginning to feel an awful lot like federal election season in Canada, complete with leaders' tours, policy roll-outs and television ads.
Canadians who remember Stephen Harper's benign, fatherly sweaters from the 2008 Conservative campaign might see some similarities with that hard-working fella at his desk in the latest round of Tory TV.
"We're in safe hands with Stephen Harper," intones a folksy baritone.
Opposition leaders might see a pair of steel fists instead. A flurry of five other Tory ads released Monday all pummel, in turn, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, NDP Leader Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois.
Ignatieff, in particular, takes a personal pounding for years spent as a public intellectual in the United States.
The Liberal leader responded by calling the ads "rubbish."
"It's the kind of politics of personal destruction that Harper has perfected," Ignatieff said in Toronto, the latest stop on his 11-day, 20-riding, election-style tour of the country.
While Ignatieff groused about his ill treatment, Layton's New Democrats proudly brandished theirs like a schoolyard shiner.
"These negative ads show that we're making Stephen Harper nervous," national director Brad Lavigne said in an internal fund-raising pitch to NDP followers Monday.
There's even a fresh buy of TV time for the government's taxpayer-funded Economic Action Plan ads, those feel-good, Tory-blue spots that herald stimulus spending begun two years ago and now in the final, mop-up stages.
Neutral observers see it all as part of a phoney, pre-writ war -- "a game of chicken" in the words of Queen's University political scientist Jonathan Rose.
A new poll Monday does nothing to amplify the election war drums.
The survey by The Canadian Press Harris-Decima found the Conservatives had opened an eight-percentage-point lead on the Liberals, 36-28, with the NDP at 15 per cent nationally. It looks good for the Tories until you consider it's less than their minority margin in the last general election.
After months of deadlock, the Conservatives also led the Liberals by five points in Ontario, 39-34. And in Quebec, the Conservatives and Liberals were statistically tied, 18-20, with the NDP at 13 per cent and the Bloc Quebecois at 40.
The poll of just more than 2,000 respondents is considered accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, 19 times in 20, with larger margins of error for regional results.
Rose said all the rhetoric doesn't necessarily mean an election is imminent.
"It's really about posing and letting the other side see you're ready, when you might not be, and putting on a particular public face," said the specialist in political communication.
"It's like the Cold War. It's not necessarily the fact that you're going to do anything, it's the fact that you can do something."
The Conservatives certainly appear to be keeping their options open, although they maintain the TV ads are purely to forestall an election Canada doesn't need.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Monday he'd be "happy" to put opposition ideas into 2011-12 budget, as long as they don't include stopping or rolling back corporate tax cuts, or involve big-spending initiatives.
And Flaherty says that budget won't be coming any time soon, leaving a number of weeks for the Conservative barrage to churn up the public opinion landscape.
The new budget, likely the first potential trigger-point for an election, is expected in late February or early March.
Lavigne of the NDP told The Canadian Press he can't tell whether the Tory attacks bring Canada any closer to an election, but says his party is well prepared for any outcome.
Layton is criss-crossing the country this month announcing new candidates; the newly renovated NDP war room near Parliament Hill is already equipped to house up to 150 party workers; and up to $23 million in campaign financing is at the ready, Lavigne said.
-- with files from Heather Scoffield
