Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is gambling that an opposition push for an unpopular carbon tax to curb global warming will steer Canadian voters to the right in today’s election and bolster his hold on power.
If the polls are any indication, though, Canada’s third national ballot in just over four years will give the country yet another minority government.
Harper’s Conservatives did not win an outright majority in the 308-seat parliament in the 2006 election. As a minority government, the Conservatives had to rely on the opposition to pass budgets and legislation.
In the 2006 election, opponents painted him as a right-winger who would reshape the landscape like a US-style Republican.
“Just because someone’s a Conservative doesn’t mean he’s George Bush,” Harper told voters in Quebec on Saturday.
The opposition Liberals have traditionally been the party in power in Canada, forming the government for more than two-thirds of the last 100 years. Analysts say Harper is intent on destroying the Liberal brand and wants to instill conservative values in Canada.
Harper hurt himself when he said during a debate that Canadians were not concerned about their jobs or their mortgages. Days later, he said stocks were cheap.
Canada’s main stock exchange then had its worst week in almost 70 years.
Harper has since tried to undo the damage by saying he knows Canadians are concerned about the economy. On Sunday, he contrasted Canada’s economic and fiscal performance with the more dire situation in the US.
“Americans are running deficits. We’re running surpluses,” he said. “Americans are incurring debt. We’re paying down debt.”
“We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years ... We have a better economic situation than the United States because, for two and a half years, we have made better choices,” he said.
Recent polls show Harper is rebounding. A Harris-Decima poll put voter support for Conservatives at 35 percent, followed by the Liberals at 26 percent and the New Democrats at 18 percent. The Bloc Quebecois was at 10 percent and the Green party had 9 percent.
The left-of-center vote is divided among four parties, which may allow Harper to win a majority government even with less than 40 percent of the overall vote.
The poll results represented 1,284 interviews conducted Wednesday through Saturday with a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.
Tom Flanagan, a former campaign director for Harper and a political scientist at the University of Calgary, said the uptick for the Conservatives in recent days shows that Canadians had second thoughts about Liberal leader Stephane Dion as prime minister.
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