Now that speculation about a spring election is finally out of the way and the two major parties are neck and neck in the polls, Ottawa is about to witness a dramatic change in how Parliament works.

The Opposition may not be able to afford an election right now, but it knows the government can’t afford one, either.

So, Opposition MPs will be far more likely to demand changes to government bills. Canada’s New Government, as the Tories insist on calling themselves, will have to rely on the ancient practice of quid pro quo and compromise to get contentious bills passed.

But most dramatically, the government is going to have to think carefully about how its bills will be transformed by the Opposition — first going through legislative committees in the House of Commons and then in the Senate.

The Tories can’t afford many repeats of the Clean Air Act. The Opposition made so many material changes to the bill while it was at legislative committee that the government is faced with the prospect of either not calling Bill C-30 for debate or holding its nose and accepting most of the changes.

This is not the time, however, to be seen to be doing nothing about the environment. So, the Tories probably will bargain for some kind of compromise.

The worst-case scenario would be the Opposition being able to get the amended legislation passed anyway through a private member’s bill.

The Conservatives’ situation is reminiscent of the one in which Bill Davis’s Ontario Tory government found itself in 1975, when it was reduced to a minority and Stephen Lewis’s NDP was the official Opposition. The Ontario Tories had a vision of rent control — but the bill that came out of the legislative process was the realization of their worst nightmares.

The federal Tory government might find the new reality a hindrance in the upcoming months. But others will find the situation empowering. Certainly, the government will not be able to control the agenda in the way it did in its first 14 months in office. Nor will it be able to continue to pretend that it has a majority.

Parliament Hill is going to be looking very congressional in the next few months — at least, until somebody decides to risk an election. Lobbyists will be working both sides of the House, as they do in Washington, D.C.

So, look for parliamentary committees to regain the influence that they had under the Liberals — which will be a distasteful prospect for a government that so far has assigned a minor role to committees.

We appear to be in for a repeat of the 1960s, when the electorate simply was not in the mood to give any party a majority until Trudeaumania swept the land in 1968.

Still, the Tories will be able to say that government really did change under their watch. The thing is: it didn’t change quite the way in which they expected.

As for when we can expect the next federal election, it will be increasingly difficult for the government to stage-manage its own defeat in the House of Commons. The government’s bill to fix terms of office between elections has just become law. It may look awkward for the government to pull the plug on this Parliament as we get closer to the fall of 2009.

In other words, there is a good chance that the next election will be at the call of the Opposition. The atmosphere in the Commons these days is so poisonous that it is difficult to imagine this Parliament lasting until 2009. An election in the spring of 2008 is far more probable.

A few months ago, it was widely assumed that the Tories would engineer an election and then sail to a majority government. Just a couple of months ago, some polls put the Tories close to majority territory as they approached 40% of public support.

But how the mighty have fallen. A spring of miscues, accidents and just plain bad luck has pushed the Tories down in several polls, into a virtual tie with the Liberals at 31%. Some are now speculating that the Tories could lose the next election.

So, look for some changes on the government front benches over the summer. The prime minister will probably be thinking about a cabinet shuffle soon after the House rises for the summer this month — if he isn’t doing so already.

@page_break@Gordon O’Connor, the gaffe-prone and snarly defence minister, will probably be dropped from cabinet. The official reason given will be because he will not run in the next election.

Another underperformer who will probably be dropped is Canadian Heritage and Status of Women Minister Bev Oda, who has been almost as accident-prone as O’Connor.

Given Oda’s experience as a former television executive and Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission commissioner, she was in position to bring some understanding to the cultural portfolio. But she has done very little.

And, ultimately, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will have to change his style in order to appear more prime ministerial. Harper’s hateful anger at the Liberals is turning off too many voters. IE