So, with just a few days to go, the real theme of this election has finally bubbled to the surface.

I’m perfectly aware that the governing Conservatives rolled the dice on this deal, but we also can’t forget that right up until the writ was dropped, the largest opposition party was essentially telling Harper that he must call an election.

The NDP likes to claim that it has been trying to bring down this government since Day 1.

It took a simple little issue to really begin to define the whole deal, which then became abundantly clear at the leaders debate.

The simple little issue that completely clarified our electoral picture was a non-starter about arts and culture spending.

To hear the left talk about it, you would think that Stephen Harper had suggested we replace every copy of Anne of Green Gables in the country with the selected writings of Karl Rove.

By the time of the English- language debate, it had become a simple issue of four left-wing parties all united in a common cause.

The central issue of our election has devolved into the common cause of socialists trying to save socialism in Canada, not from itself, but from us.

If it were not so terribly sad, this would be a laughable farce.

On one hand we have the loony tunes left, the far left, and the “left only when we’re not on the right like right now” left, all lined up alongside a party whose sole aim is to destroy Canada, against the ever-so-slightly-to-the-right Conservatives.

Their self-proclaimed aim is to save Canada from the scary boogeyman from Calgary.

Does the concept of Gilles Duceppe claiming to be acting in the best interests of the country not belong in a Monty Python skit?

None of them —not one — could get through the leaders’ debates without trying to make the moronically laughable equation of Harper to George W. Bush.

Think about it. The very same people who have been the driving forces in the expansion of the nanny state, who feel that our anti-smoking laws, for example, are not nearly strong enough or harsh enough, can’t bring themselves to support tougher punishments for violent offenders.

The very people who routinely howl that we should confiscate and destroy all the legally owned firearms in the country, can’t bring themselves to throw those who commit multiple firearms offences in jail for extended periods of time.

It becomes a theatre of the absurd, when Margaret Atwood, a self-proclaimed leftist, can do the intellectual gymnastics that allow her to see that by trimming state funding of the arts, and thusly some of the state influence, we are somehow interfering with artistic freedoms in this country.

So heinous are these cuts, she proclaims, that they are the most pressing issue of our day. So vile are the people who would debase the arts, that to re-elect them puts the very survival of our country in peril.

In fact, according to Atwood, the separatists are preferable to the Philistine conservatives, as anyone who could contemplate reducing taxpayer funding of the arts can only be a simple majority away from embarking on their hidden agenda to remake Canada into a fascist police state.

I’m not kidding here.

The elites have united against us, the people.

They believe — they know — they are entitled to their entitlements.

The Bloc would be dead in the water if we, the people, had shown some backbone and simply said “No. People who wish to dismantle the country have no place in our Parliament.”

The Greens have been empowered by an exorbitant funding law, and given false legitimacy by a compliant media that routinely overlooks some of their nastier tendencies.

The NDP is led by a man who is the classic limousine socialist. Born into great wealth, Jack Layton leads a fringe party that continuously makes the claim to be “speaking for all Canadians,” even when four out of five Canadians consistently reject his ideology.

Stephane Dion clings to his political life, and to his entitlements.

He is entitled to be completely unintelligible to great swaths of the citizenry. He is entitled to retain the citizenship of a foreign land that he sought to further his education and career. His party is entitled to govern.

These people can’t envision a Canada in which the people push back just a little, tiny bit and reclaim some of our Canada for ourselves. After all, that would leave less for them.

Bill Greenwood is a local freelance columnist.