Tories want some Quebecers outside

LAVAL - For just the second time in this campaign, a Conservative party rally and speech by leader Stephen Harper was disrupted by protesters who made it past security screening and got inside a pep rally.

What appeared to be three demonstrators stood up just as Harper began to speak, and unfurled banners that read "Stop Global Warming." Once again members of the security detail pounced, ripping the banners out of their hands and quickly hustling them out the door.

Party supporters leapt to their feet and began cheering "Harper, Harper" to drown out and distract from the ouster of the interlopers.

It's an unusual sight. Only once before, in Rockland, Ontario, did a single protester get past the party's gatekeepers at the door.

Here in Laval, outside the rally, there were other protesters, members of FRAPU, a group that advocates for affordable social housing. On the weekend, 5,000 protesters from many groups, women's advocates and labour unions included, protested against Harper.

The Conservatives, who just a few short weeks ago looked as if they might increase their 10 seats in Quebec, now are in a hard-fought battle with the Bloc Québécois, which has recovered in the polls.

Harper made an impassioned pitch for support here, saying Quebeckers should vote Conservative to be "at the table" and not just in outside "in the corridors," as BQ leader Gilles Duceppe wants, said Harper.

"The Conservative party wants Quebecers on the inside," Harper added.

Except during its campaign rallies, perhaps.

-Tonda MacCharles

Give us our votes back

Stéphane Dion has a message for Jack Layton: "We want our vote back."

In the last election, Layton made a play for Liberal supporters with the campaign slogan, "lend us your votes."

Today during a stop in Victoria, Dion took a shot at Layton and the NDP's decision to join with the opposition Conservatives in 2005 to topple the minority Liberal government.

That cost Canada a host of progressive policies, he told a rally.

"At the end we didn’t have childcare, we didn’t have the Kelowna Accord for aboriginal people, we didn’t have a lot of sound policies, but we had Stephen Harper," Dion said.

"Last time Jack Layton said ‘Lend me your vote’ and we had Stephen Harper. This time we want our vote back, with interest,” he said to cheers of supporters.

- Bruce Campion-Smith

 

No Afghanistan questions for defence minister?

Students at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., are set to grill the candidates in Central Nova on student debt, post-secondary education for Aboriginal peoples, market-based approaches to energy policies and the brain drain.

But there are questions conspicuously absent for a debate that will feature Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Conservative incumbent Peter MacKay.

There is nothing on the biggest news of the day, namely how each party will manage the economy.

Stranger still, there are no questions about reducing greenhouse gases and not a single word about the war in Afghanistan.

It's not as if they have a defence minister in the hot seat or anything.

Oh, right, they do.

- Joanna Smith

Help wanted: NDP finance minister, must be living

NDP Leader Jack Layton says there may be no one in his caucus who has experience in balancing government books but the New Democrats always have Tommy Douglas and former NDP Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow and Manitoba Premier Gary Doer.

Huh?

None of these guys are in the Layton caucus the last time anyone checked.

How the late Douglas, whose name Layton evokes at every opportunity, is going to help in these tumultuous economic time escaped many at a Vancouver press conference today.

"Tommy Douglas had only been a young member of Parliament for one term and then he became the premier of Saskatchewan for 17 years, brought in Medicare, balanced the budget every single year even though they started out with a horrific deficit."

"I can think of Roy Romanow who took over a a Conservative basket case of an economy in Saskatchewan and made the decisions to turn it around."

"I could go on. I could mention Gary Doer who's regarded by many as one of the most successful managers of budgets and policies in Canada."

That is a long way around of saying the NDP has no a natural choice for finance minister if the party was to ever form the government.

- Richard Brennan

In need of a second wind

NDP Leader Jack Layton doesn't like bankers. He's always blaming them for ripping off people at ATMs while holding their hands out for tax cuts. Why, today in Vancouver he even said they were gouging motorists at the pumps. Of course, he meant to say big oil companies. Layton is looking and sounding tired these days and he still has eight days left.

- Richard Brennan

Polar beer, anyone?

Stephane Dion recalled today how his troubles with English once had an audience chortling as he discussed what was supposed to be a serious topic – endangered species.

Dion told how he gave a speech as Minister of the Environment about the need to protect wildlife and species at risk, including polar bears.

“For whatever reason they were laughing when I was delivering my speech . . . it was not funny. I was speaking about species at risk,” Dion said Sunday during a visit to Churchill, MB.

Dion said he later asked his staff what the audience found so funny.

“They said to me ‘Minister, all the speech long you spoke about the polar beer. You were saying to them ‘we need to save the polar beer. It’s our identity’,” Dion recalled Saturday.

“Since then I made some progress in English I hope,” he said.

He has. As he told the Churchill crowd about his afternoon trip to see polar bears on the tundra near their northern Manitoba town, there was doubt he was talking about the animal, not a drink.

Bruce Campion-Smith

Leaders beat a path to the north

Nunavut residents are seeing something new in this federal election – the party leaders.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion and NDP Leader Jack Layton have all made the journey north this campaign to woo northern voters.

This sprawling riding is seen as a key battle to replace the Liberal incumbent who has retired from politics.

Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik was on hand Sunday morning when Dion made his pitch during a news conference on the Iqaluit waterfront.

“We appreciate the attention,” Okalik later told reporters.

“The fact that they’re here is a real improvement. The last few campaigns we never had any party leaders come our way so this is quite something new,” he said.

Okalik is staying neutral in this campaign, saying only that he wishes “them all the best.

“My main concern is how these parties will deliver to the territory and what they promise,” he said.

 

 

In Bob Rae's shadow

Jack Layton says he not feeling the pressure of trying to outdo former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who came close in 1988 to forming the official opposition with a party record of 43 seats.
"None," said Layton standing on a deck overlooking the seventh hole of Pippy Park Golf Club in St. John's.

"We are actually asking for Prime Minister and government, which axiomatically would mean that we had exceeded that particular achievement."

Layton also played down the shadow that Bob Rae's NDP government in Ontario casts on the federal New Democrats.

"I think you are going to have to ask that question of Mr. Dion. He's on Mr. Dion's team," he said, referring to the fact Rae, a longtime New Democrat, is now an a Liberal MP in Leader Stephane Dion's caucus.

Others NDP movers and shakers confide privately that Rae's  government, which racked up a huge deficit from 1990-95, still leaves huge doubts in the public mind about how the party would do if it ever formed the government in Ottawa.

Layton said he wouldn't run a deficit and drew attention to the other provincial NDP governments that always balanced the books, including Saskatchewan's Tommy Douglas' 17 balanced budgets in a row.

Bar with a 'civilized' touch

There is a bar in St. John's, Nfld., one of 120 in the downtown district, that knows how to look after its patrons. At Erin's a fellow can answer the call of nature and rest his forehead against a strategically placed pad on the wall. How bloody civilized.

Richard Brennan

Smile!

"Look cheerful," an NDP supporter told a rather subdued crowd in Sydney when NDP Leader Jack Layton made a quick visit to Cape Breton today. Even the supporters acknowledged to reporters that the New Democrats didn't stand a chance here. Even so the more than 50 supporters put on a brave face and cheered Layton's stump speech. Next stop on his tarmac tour, Charlottetown, PEI.

Richard Brennan