PERHAPS ONE OF THE MOST troubling aspects of predictions we’ve seen for this new year is that it will be an improvement on 2009.

It’s troubling, if only because it seems that such predictions rarely come true.

Shortly before Christmas, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record published an opinion piece by Geoffrey Stevens, a former managing editor of The Globe and Mail who now teaches politics at Wilfrid Laurier University and came up with some pretty safe predictions for 2010 by confining them to the political arena.

His first prediction was that 2010 will be a good year for Stephen Harper, a bad year for Dalton McGuinty “and very bad year for Michael Ignatieff.”

Noting that the imminent retirement of Liberal senators will finally give the Harper Conservatives control of the upper house, he said the PM “will toy – for perhaps 30 seconds – with the notion of appointing a few distinguished Canadians before adopting the course articulated by Brian Mulroney so many years ago: to appoint non- Tories only after every living, breathing Conservative in the land has been rewarded. Although it may not be easy, Harper will manage to find enough Tory hacks willing to swear blind allegiance to the party line.”

Within days of the opinion piece appearing, Mr. Harper dealt effectively with the only struggle the pundit saw in store for him. “The Prime Minister will struggle in the months of 2010 as the Afghan-detainee issue refuses to go away, but he will finesse it by continuing to sabotage the parliamentary committee (as he did this past week) or by forcing the prorogation of Parliament (as he did during the “coalition” crisis a year ago).”

Instead, the PM staved off any struggle by postponing the next parliamentary session until mid-March, ostensibly to avoid detracting from the 2010 Olympics.

Perhaps the safest prediction was that despite having a majority of seats in the Ontario legislature, Premier Dalton McGuinty “will be far from comfortable. The eHealth scandal will not go away, nor will the HST controversy, and his attempts to reduce Ontario’s monumental deficit by selling off such crown jewels as the liquor stores will send his approval numbers to depths unplumbed by even Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, a dead man walking if there ever was one.”

Mr. Stevens’ expectation is that Mr. McGuinty will not lead the Liberals into the October 2011 election and the party “will welcome back George Smitherman, fresh from his defeat in the Toronto mayoralty.”

And he sees a similar fate awaiting Michael Ignatieff, who he sees as having to “continue to struggle with the problem of convincing his Liberals to all row in the same direction while he establishes the party as a viable alternative to the Conservatives.”

The prediction: “By the end of the year, he will be ready to give up, and the Liberals will plan a leadership convention for May 2011.”

Although such scenarios for McGuinty and Ignatieff now seem highly plausible, they obviously depend to a considerable extent on the federal and provincial Conservatives not committing any serious errors.

A much safer prediction in the column was that there will be no federal election this year.

“Harper doesn’t need one; he will reconcile himself to continuing to govern as though he had a majority. The Liberals, as Ignatieff made clear in a weekend interview, have no intention of triggering an election, and the other two opposition parties are afraid to pull the trigger. Harper will have clear sailing in 2010.”

Similarly safe were the other three predictions, that Michaëlle Jean will not be reappointed Governor General when her five-year term expires in September, and will be succeeded by a male social conservative; that Maxime Bernier will be returned to the federal cabinet ‘as Harper, appreciating the public’s short memory, seeks to gain an edge in Quebec,” and that Jim Balsillie “will not land an NHL franchise for Hamilton or anywhere else.”

Interestingly, the column avoided any predictions for the economy or even for how the federal Conservatives and provincial Liberals will deal with the current huge deficits as both look to elections in the not-too-distant future.

Our expectation is that they will avoid both tax increases and unpopular cuts in services and wind up predicting deficits that will be far smaller than they really expect.

Will it be a year of economic recovery? Everyone certainly hopes it will, but the most logical prediction is that the improvement will be slow, particularly in terms of employment.

One thing for sure is that it will be an interesting year for those involved in or monitoring local politics, since it will feature province-wide municipal elections.

Our hope is that it will also be a year when Dufferin County finally makes some real progress in terms of solid waste management, with construction at last starting on both the composting facility and energy-from-waste projects at DEEP (the Dufferin EcoEnergy Park).