Canada’s Conservatives appeared on Monday to be riding a wave of public support that could hand them their first majority government since 1988, but the party did all it could to minimize such expectations.
The Conservatives, who formed a minority government after the last election in 2006, entered the second day of the campaign for the Oct. 14 vote with clear signs of being better organized and financed than their main opposition, the Liberals. Polls also showed voters strongly prefer Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper over Liberal leader Stephane Dion.
A Segma poll in Monday’s La Presse newspaper put support for the Conservatives at 43 percent, which would translate into about 183 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons. The poll gave the Liberals 25 percent, or about 62 seats.
“To say that things are going badly for the Liberals is a euphemism. In fact, it smells like a rout,” columnist Vincent Marissal wrote in La Presse.
The Conservatives had 127 seats in the old Parliament, while the Liberals had 95. The separatist Bloc Quebecois had 48 seats, the left-leaning New Democrats 30 seats and the Greens one. There were three independents and four seats were vacant.
Harper has consistently said he expects the most likely result will be another minority government and downplayed polls indicating it would actually be a majority.
Part of the concern the Conservatives have is that if they are clearly the front-runner then all the other parties train their sights on them.
Also, some voters are concerned about what they see as a right-wing Conservative agenda and about what the Conservatives would do if they did not have to rely on another party to stay in power.
The two top issues in the campaign so far are who would be best to lead the country through a period of economic weakness and whether to adopt the Liberal plan to fight global warming with carbon taxes, offset partly with income tax cuts.
After weeks during which the Conservatives had the advertising field to themselves, the Liberals finally put out a series of ads on Sunday night touting the benefits of their carbon tax plan and moving forward to a green economy.
The Conservatives started off with soft ads showing Harper as a family man, but on Monday launched attack ads warning that Dion would raise taxes and prices.
Dion told a rally in Montreal on Monday he was not concerned about the polls and said the Liberals would triumph over Harper and his “laissez-faire, I-don’t-care approach.”
“His direction is a recession, his direction is a deficit, his direction is a mess that he’s giving to this economy again,” he said.
TV networks announced on Monday the party leaders would have two nationally televised debates, one in French on Oct. 1 and another in English on Oct. 2.
But the networks rejected a request from the Green Party to be included in the debates after three of the more established parties objected.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May threatened on Monday a lawsuit to force organizers to include her.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion