With a week to go before voting day, Liberal leader Stephane Dion swept into B.C. Tuesday reaching out to left-of-centre parties for support.
“A vote for [NDP leader] Jack Layton will save only one job: [Conservative Prime Minister] Stephen Harper’s job,” Dion said at a rally before Liberal supporters in Vancouver.
Dion said the NDP and the Greens won’t have their goals met if Harper stays in power.
“I’m not only calling for a strategic vote,” Dion said. “I’m asking that NDP voters ask themselves, do you think you will have a prime minister more committed to fight poverty than me? Do you think Stephen Harper has a plan to have more child care here in Canada?”
The Liberal leader’s pleas echo similar ones from the NDP’s Layton, who only a day earlier encouraged Grits to park their vote with the New Democrats.
B.C. has several tight three-way races involving the Tories, Liberals and NDP. In the Lower Mainland alone, five ridings were decided by less than five per cent of the total vote in the last election – six, if you include the razor-thin 151-vote result in this year’s Vancouver-Quadra byelection.
Meanwhile, two separate nightly national polls released yesterday suggested the gap was continuing to narrow between the Tories and the Liberals. A Harris/Decima poll placed the Liberals five percentage points behind while a Nanos poll had the Libs within three points. Both of the daily shifts were within the polls’ margins of error: plus or minus 2.8 and 3.1 per cent, respectively.
Irwin Loy reports for Vancouver's 24 hours.
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G West
3 years ago
Goals
We've been here before...the liberals are always willing to accept help - especially when they're out of favour - they don't like it much when they don't have power.
No other party should cooperate with Dion and his Campbell Family Compact without a signed, sealed and notarized agreement that gives them cabinet ministers, a good chunk of the legislative program and a commitment to change the electoral system...at a minimum.
Liberals are always prepared to pick a pocket or two...but not in the public interest as a rule. Just because they’re addicted to power and self interest.
Reagan's maxim would be a guideline...'trust, but verify.'
Budd Campbell
3 years ago
Is it impolite to say Dion is lyingr?
"With a week to go before voting day, Liberal leader Stephane Dion swept into B.C. Tuesday reaching out to left-of-centre parties for support."
Just the other day, and in the national debate, this self-proclaimed intellectual and man of integrity called Jack Layton an "old-fashioned socialist". Why? Because Layton proposed to leave corporate income taxes at the same level as former PM Paul Martin did. Do Dion and Marissen now figure that Martin too was an old fashioned socialist?
And in an earlier Tyee story the Liberal candidate in Victoria, Anne Park Shannon, frostily dismissed the idea of any cooperation between the Liberals and the NDP post-election, saying “The Liberals and the NDP are very different.”
http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/Federal-Politics/2008/10/07/CoalitionUnwelcome/
Now Dion is turning 180 degrees and appealing to New Democrats, and to working women needing a national child care program, and saying he's on their side. (The Liberal Red Book made its first fake promise of a national child care plan in 1993, fifteen long years ago. The lie has been repeated in every election since.)
If this is the standard of honesty we can expect in Canadian politics, it must be that nothing has changed, it's just the same old, same old, one more time.
Frank
3 years ago
Garbage
“I’m asking that NDP voters ask themselves, do you think you will have a prime minister more committed to fight poverty than me?"
Fact is Mr Dion I think everyone else is more committed to fighting poverty than you are.
As for Irwin Loy, your last paragraph is typical Liberal boiler-plate. You're forgetting that depending on which poll you look at the Liberals are running third or even fourth in BC so NDPers voting Liberal in BC will help elect Conservatives.
Budd Campbell
3 years ago
Boilerplate? Or verbal diarhea?
Frank, I think you've been way too polite. Boilerplate applies to standard text that can be useful. The kind of thing that's in the last paragraph is a bit gamier than that. Verbal diarrea is the term that comes to mind.
Loy is using national polls because he knows that if he used provincial polls the impact on the reader would be different.