“Mr. Harper, your time is up.” With that line, Michael Ignatieff, leader of the federal Liberals, appeared to signal that a fall election was an inevitability.

As a catchphrase, it’s not much, and mostly just confirms that Ignatieff, whatever other skills he brings to the job, has no aptitude for political theatre.

For one thing, he made this statement on September 1, a week before Labour Day and the first day of school for most students, and in the middle of an uncharacteristically sunny and warm stretch of weather for seat-rich Ontario. (That his statement and pledge was reported on the same day as the news about Michael Bryant, and thus mostly buried, is just bad luck.)

He also made the statement just three days before the start of a planned visit to China, which he has now canceled so as not to be on the other side of the world while the country was absorbing the news that it was headed for an early election. The whole thing looks like terrible planning.

Aside from a still-rotten economy — for which an election does not present itself as the most obvious cure — there is no single, pressing issue that would make yet another trip to the local school gym or community centre to fill out a ballot seem vital and necessary. That’s not to say there are no important issues in the air at the moment, just that nothing has taken on any sense of urgency. This is only underscored by the fact that, until Ignatieff announced that the government’s time was up, he’d been pretty much invisible all summer. For most people, it’s as if the guy just hopped out of bed after a long nap and said, “Okay kids, election time!”

To be clear, none of this should be read as an endorsement by this writer of the minority Tory government, or a declaration that an early election would be meaningless, or even Liberal suicide. Just that, for the moment, Harper is dictating the terms. He and his team are masters at controlling the political narrative. They screw up, for sure, usually when their core sense of smug triumphalism gets the best of them and overwhelms message discipline, or when they bare the sharper points of their spiky ideology, one that is still not quite acceptable to Canada’s vast, mushy middle. But for the most part, they know how to keep ahold of the reins. Anyone wanting to take them away from him needs to be, first and foremost, a good politician.

Which is why, even beyond the poor timing and planning, “Mr Harper, your time is up” is such a piss-poor way to kick off a pre-campaign campaign. It positions the speaker as being a kind of rebel, outside the gates, looking to storm the palace. Which is maybe the right image for the NDP or the Green Party, but doesn’t help create the aura of “government in waiting” that the Liberals need to project. And from someone like Ignatieff, it just sounds like faux-toughness. Whatever impression people have gained of Michael Ignatieff thus far, positive or negative, it’s not one of a firebrand rabble-rouser, looking to sweep clean the corridors of power.

If he’s going to get anywhere with this fall election threat, Ignatieff needs to what most people seem tragically reluctant to do these days: hire better writers.