Election chatter is Canada's version of the Terrorism Scare Story

All this election talk just a way for the Harper government to distract the media from bad news, like the Bush administration deflects media criticism by chattering about terrorism alerts.
How dumb is Canada's media to fall for this? The bad news for the Tories has been building lately -- the increasingly-bad Mulroney news, the Khadr case, the mishandling of Afghan prisoners, the isotope debacle, the muzzling of environmental scientists, the Ontario economy, the gutting of the Wheat Board, the new Baird investigation -- so its not surprising that the Tories are trying to keep all this out of the headlines by generating some chatter about another election:

A federal budget expected in the last week of February, a vote on the Afghanistan military mission by the end of March and some arbitrary Tory brinkmanship on the government's omnibus crime bill have conspired to place a new best-before date on Harper's two-year-old administration.

Yeah, sure.
The Liberals are not, I don't think, suicidal enough to vote against what will be a typical pennies-for-everyone Tory budget, so this leaves the Senate and Afghanistan. The Tories will just look stupid if they force an election over how poorly they have handled getting their crime legislation through the Senate. And the Tories certainly aren't going to get the ten extra seats they need from Quebec by fighting an election about keeping the Van Doos in the line of fire in Afghanistan.
Just watch -- as soon as Schreiber is out of the country and the parliamentary hearings are over, all the election chatter will disappear too.