Canada goes to the polls on Tuesday, October 14th and the election once believed to be a breeze for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives has tighten up considerably. We’ll start our coverage of the Great White North with a little satire from Rick Mercer.
And here’s Rick ripping the Liberal Party earlier this year for opposing Prime Minister Harper’s budget and yet allowing it to pass for fear of early elections which at that point they would have lost. Ah Canada, good luck next Tuesday.
The Rise and Fall of the Harper Majority
By William Johnson in the Globe and Mail.
What happened? When Stephen Harper called an early election Sept. 7, it looked like a sure thing for him and his party. The Conservatives were alone on the centre-right, while four parties divided the centre-left vote.
As to which leader would make the best prime minister, polls showed Mr. Harper exceeding the combined scores of the opposition leaders. Stéphane Dion, leading a party in debt and disarray, was even outpolled by Jack Layton.
Mr. Harper had led a steady government in good times, surprising those expecting a right-wing gorilla, and the financial crisis suggested returning an experienced leader, an economist to boot. But the Prime Minister’s greatest accomplishment was most unexpected: The outsider, the Westerner, had so disarmed Quebec’s nationalist animosity that secession, a prominent threat in 2005, had fallen off the agenda.
So why have the Conservatives fallen in the polls to within the margin of error of support for the Liberals?
The economy? Just a guess.
Tories show video to play up Dion’s language difficulties
By Tonda MacCharles in The Star.
Conservative leader Stephen Harper emerged shortly after a broadcast interview aired showing Liberal leader Stéphane Dion struggling in English to grasp a simple economic question, suggesting his answers showed he was unfit to lead the country.
Harper moved quickly to exploit what the Conservatives said is a damning, embarrassing piece of tape, in which Dion asked for three takes to answer what he would have done about the economy if he were prime minister now.
Harper told reporters that: “When you’re managing a trillion-and-a-half-dollar economy, you don’t get a chance to do do-overs, over and over again.”
Liberal leader Stéphane Dion is a native French speaker. He speaks heavily accented English.
The anti-Conservative vote
From the Globe and Mail.
What’s the best way for the Liberals or the NDP to try to consolidate anti-Conservative votes behind them in the campaign’s final days?
Gerald Caplan (former NDP campaign manager): We have come to a pretty pass indeed. The parties are stuck. The citizenry is stuck. There is no Mo.
This happened already midway through the campaign, with Stephen Harper higher, Stephane Dion lower, and Jack Layton about the same as now. Here we go again, right down to the wire. No one expected this.
Here’s the biggest mystery – why is the NDP stuck? Why can’t it seem to get beyond that rascally 20 per cent threshold that has been its nemesis forever? It’s been tantalizingly close to the Liberals, but can’t make the all-important great leap forward. Now, with Mr. Dion doing better – or more accurately, not embarrassing himself any longer – the gap between second and third seems to be growing again. And there’s no easy way out.
Harper Sharpens Attacks on Liberals to Stem Poll Slide
By Theophilos Argitis and Alexandre Deslongchamps for Bloomberg News.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper ramped up attacks on his main rival, Stephane Dion, in a bid to shift voter attention away from financial turmoil and stop his party’s slide in polls before elections on Oct. 14.
Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty yesterday sought to reassure investors they’re “doing everything” necessary to help the economy cope with a credit freeze, after opposition parties said the Conservative Party government wasn’t doing enough. Harper also said a Liberal Party proposal to tax greenhouse gas emissions would trigger a bigger crisis.
“It comes down to a very simple choice,” Harper, 49, told reporters at a campaign stop in Richmond, British Columbia. “Do Canadians want, at a time of economic trouble, to take economic policies which common sense tells us will drive us into a recession, cost jobs, raise interest rates and make everybody’s lives a lot more difficult?”
The Tory Story
John Akpata of the Marijuana Party
I love Canada. I really do. I could do without Stephen Harper though.
