Pre-election surge for Canadian Conservatives
Canada’s Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper has set his sights on two traditional Liberal Party strongholds – Ontario and Québec – as support for his party surged in one poll but fell in another with only five days before the country elects a new government.
Harper addressed loud rallies yesterday in Toronto and Montréal, with adoring supporters chanting one of the central themes of the so-far successful Conservative campaign: A time for change.
After a rally in Toronto, Harper headed to Québec, where polls show the Conservatives have twice as much support as the Liberals, a rarity in the French-speaking province that typically supports the separatist Bloc Québecois or Liberals.
The influential Québec newspaper La Presse endorsed the Conservatives – who didn’t win any seats in Québec in the last election.
After 13 years of Liberal Party governments led by Jean Chretien and current Prime Minister Paul Martin, Harper’s Conservatives could not only make big gains next Monday, but possibly even win a majority of 308 seats in the House of Commons.
Martin’s minority government was toppled in a no-confidence vote in November, after his Liberals were unable to overcome a corruption scandal involving tens of millions of misspent tax dollars by Québec’s Liberal Party members that prompted a federal inquiry.
“This election is about choice: a government plagued by scandal, that is only in it for what it can take, or our new team, who want into public office for what it can give,” Harper said at a southern Ontario rally in Burlington on Tuesday night and then again in Toronto yesterday.
He told a packed hotel ballroom in downtown Montréal last night that a vote for the Tories would boost Québec, whose reputation has been tarnished by the Liberal corruption scandal.
He also said a Conservative government would fight to preserve national unity, referring to the narrow defeat in 1995 of a bloc referendum for Québec sovereignty.
A new poll for The Globe and Mail newspaper indicated the Tories were well ahead and could possibly even win a majority of 308 seats in the House of Commons on election day.
Harper, whose constituency is in Calgary, is against gay marriage, which is legal in Canada, and the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouses gases. He once referred to Canada as a “northern European welfare state” weighed down by too many social programmes.
He has said he would reassess Canada’s decision to opt out of the US ballistic missile programme and once hinted at support for the war in Iraq, which most Canadians condemn.
But Harper has largely kept his most conservative views to himself and his handlers have successfully portrayed him as a moderate who will work for the middle class of Ontario, the country’s most populous province and a Liberal Party stronghold.
At a rally in Ontario, Martin painted his rival as an extremist and warned Harper would scrap gay marriage and the right to an abortion.
“If you want to stop Stephen Harper, if you don’t agree with Mr. Harper’s values – such as the war in Iraq and missile defence – there’s only one choice you can make and that’s the Liberal Party,” Martin said.
“The question isn’t change. It’s change for what? I don’t believe that Canadians want to roll back the clock.”
