It’s now Day 22 of the campaign; Jack Layton is in St John’s, Michael Ignatieff is in Regina and Stephen Harper is in Vancouver.
In Charlottetown, PEI, yesterday, Jack Layton announced his support for a new power-transmission line to the island. (This announcement doesn’t appear to have aired anywhere, so unfortunately I can’t fill you in on any details. Apparently there were pool-feed issues with the NDP campaign once again.)
At a town hall in Sudbury, Ignatieff began by warming up the crowd with the quip, “They say that politics is show business for ugly people, and I may be ugly, but this isn’t show business – this is democracy.” Following his spiel about democracy, he gave some shout-outs to Northern Ontario and the need to ensure that foreign investment has local benefits. He took questions from the floor about drilling in the Far North (he doesn’t support it because of the environmental impact); sovereignty in the Arctic (the most important kind is investing in the people of the North); the health accord (he’s eager to start talking to the premiers after forming a government, not waiting until 2014 and we need to focus on prevention); the CBC… and that was when CPAC cut away. Apparently, Ignatieff closed the event by adding some of Bruce Springsteen’s “Rise Up” to his routine. While the crowd apparently ate it up, we’ll see if it resonates enough to breathe new life into this campaign.
In Saskatoon, Harper held a rally where he began with a shout-out to the issue of the spring flooding and moved directly into the same rally speech he’s given everywhere in English Canada. (Seriously, could Data please just decompress the main shuttlebay and avoid colliding with the USS Bozeman so we can escape this temporal causality loop?) There was the [insert daily announcement here] before going through the same policy points as at every previous rally, the [insert local infrastructure projects here], the plea for stability and security and finally his appeal to patriotism.
And elsewhere, the polygamy trial in BC is wrapping up.
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