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.