The biggest game in Ottawa these days is pinning the election date. Paul Martin recently dashed prospects of a quick election call when he told reporters his top priority is governing, not electioneering. This was followed by news the Prime Minister will visit U.S. President George Bush at the end of the month. Which, we are told, will delay an election until June.

But a read of the tealeaves suggests even the June timeline is unlikely. This is because there are two important ingredients Mr. Martin needs before calling an election, at least one he hopes to have a reasonable change of winning. The first is evidence his government is capable of managing taxpayers' money following revelations that $100-million was paid to Liberal-friendly advertising firms for little or no work. This, of course, is easier said than done.

The second thing Mr. Martin needs is time. And because time is something beyond even the control of a Prime Minister, the election will not happen before Labour Day.

Although the "new" government has taken steps to clean things up, Mr. Martin has not met the modest expectations of taxpayers.

The Commons committee examining the sponsorship scandal has become a forum for partisan bickering rather than fact finding. The government's much-hyped whistleblower legislation is inadequate because the new Integrity Commissioner will report to a minister and not directly to Parliament. (Ottawa's Ethics Commission currently reports to the Prime Minister, and not Parliament, and because of this he is Cabinet's lapdog, not its watchdog.)

And Canadians must be puzzled with Mr. Martin for accepting at face value the "we did nothing wrong" story from Jean Pelletier, the long-time chief of staff to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, over the government's awarding of contracts in Quebec. Did Mr. Martin think rule-breakers were simply going to admit wrongdoing If he did, changing the government's culture will not happen under his watch, as this will require removing bad apples, including people linked to the Liberal Party.

Time is working against the Prime Minister. Even if he re-tools the whistleblower legislation and proves he is capable of punishing the people who broke the rules, voters will need time to register these changes.

Adscam demonstrated Ottawa wasted millions of our tax dollars, which is something voters will not easily forget. As evidence, take the recent budget. It did not provide the government with even a brief reprieve from the scandal. Post-budget public opinion polls showed no change in the standing of the Liberal government, which remains stuck in minority government territory. The budget did not even register a dead cat bounce in their poll numbers. It failed because it left the impression nothing changed in Ottawa. (Had Mr. Martin cut taxes he would have sent a powerful message to voters: That Ottawa has too much money, that the government will root out waste, return some of it to Canadians, and spend what remains responsibly. Instead, Mr. Martin chose to spend more and so it was back to the spending scandals.)

Mr. Martin has currency with voters because of his success in eliminating the deficit, but taxpayers are in a fickle mood. Many believe that under Liberal rule the government has become rotten.

A political party can continue to mess up the smaller points of government and be re-elected as long as the public believes it is satisfactorily managing the big picture. Events have conspired in a way that Mr. Martin has this golden rule backwards. He has taken small steps, not bold action. Nothing, it seems, is going well for Prime Minister Martin - or for taxpayers now wondering whatever happened to the promise to fix the system "come hell or high water."