Allow me to take you back - way back - all the way to spring, 2004.

Having come to office promising to inject new life into politics, a listless Prime Minister was struggling to define himself and his agenda. His government was tainted by a still-fresh sponsorship scandal. The fledgling opposition party was largely an unknown commodity, especially in Ontario, and its own vision for the country was fuzzy. No major policy issue gripped the nation. And not one federal leader was showing any sign he could connect with mainstream Canadians.

We were told, for some reason, that this would lead to a historic and memorable election campaign. And it was - if closeness is the operative criterion.

By every other measure, it was a disaster. For nearly the entire campaign, the two leading parties seemed to be in competition to see which could hand the other the election on a silver platter. And when the dust had settled after five nasty weeks, we were left with a Liberal minority that was even worse than the Liberal majority that preceded it. From the minute they returned to parliament, all four parties have been so consumed with political gamesmanship that policy has taken more of a backseat than ever.

Fast forward 10 months. An array of opinion leaders are again convinced that an election is the cure for all that ails us (or, as Andrew Coyne put it last week, "a soothing balm of relief"). Calls for a spring campaign have been flowing for weeks - and there will no doubt be plenty more in the wake of yesterday's release of Jean Brault's damning testimony before the Gomery inquiry.

Forcing an election now, though, would only be ideal if we wanted Canadians to choose their next government based on still-sketchy information about the wrongs allegedly committed years ago under a different prime minister.

And aside from more light having been shed on Adscam, circumstances are almost identical to those in 2004.

True, the Conservatives are moderately better organized, Stephen Harper will be a little more difficult to paint as a bogeyman and the public is more disillusioned with Paul Martin's party. With yesterday's bombshells, it's a fairly safe bet the Liberals would at the very least see their plurality further reduced; the Conservatives could even surge into the lead. But the campaign would still be uglier and more counterproductive than the last one.

There are still no defining issues, no clear national agendas, and no sense that the parties would have anything remotely positive to tell voters. If anything, the leaders are even less connected to voters than they were last year.

Given the degree to which many disgusted Liberals have yet to be won over by anyone else, an election this spring would likely produce record lows in voter turnout. The result, no doubt, would be another minority parliament paralyzed by goofy gamesmanship - at which point, we'd start obsessing all over again about the next non-confidence vote.

As for Adscam, we still don't know quite what happened - and we won't, at least not before going to the polls, if we don't let the Gomery inquiry run its course. If all concerned really are interested in getting to the bottom of who did what, the correct course is to hear the thing out - not cut it off because a witness has offered some juicy tidbits.

To his credit, Mr. Harper may understand this. Or perhaps he just figures things will get worse for the Liberals before they get better. (He may also want some extra time to win over Ontario by joining Dalton McGuinty's campaign for more federal dollars, but that's a whole other column.) Whatever the case, he seems less obsessed with the prospect of going to the polls than most of the people covering him.

The press gallery appears to have come down with worse Attention Deficit Disorder than usual. It may now be centred around Adscam, but the same election rumours pop up every time the parties have some minor procedural dispute. From the get-go, there has been barely any pretense of treating this like a functional government; it's all been about how quickly we could get this between-election stuff over with and get back on the hustings.

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I'd like to at least pretend it's possible to wait for an election until one of the parties asks us to vote for something - not just against a scandal that, however appalling, we can do little about now.

Holding my breath for another year probably won't be too comfortable. But it'll be less painful than suffering through a national campaign even more depressing than the last one.