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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS