rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Target Trudeau

by Brian McKenna

“At a Layton breakfast this morning, the consensus among the national press corps traveling with the NDP leader has him the clear winner in the English debate. “Now,” said one reporter, “it comes down to the ground war,” — which traditionally, the dippers have been very strong doing.

A week ago  Outremont NDP MP Tom Mulcair’s indefatigable assistant Graeme Carpenter was up until 4 am putting up massive Layton Mulcair posters along the road that snakes over Mt. Royal. They must have put up 50, at $20 a pop. It was great backdrop for a Layton mountain top  press conference the next morning. The NDP owned the mountain. This morning, except for the posters requiring more than a step ladder to reach, almost every one of the signs has been torn down, in a systematic manner.

Meanwhile, in Westmount Ville Marie, the Liberals are pulling a Palin with their candidate, weapons engineer Marc Garneau, who went into space as a “payload specialist”. He has twice cancelled appearances at debates and seems to have totally gone to ground. They seem to have concluded, the more people compare him to the NDP candidate, Anne Lagace Dowson, (I confess my bias. She’s my spouse) the more they turn away from Garneau. My guess is that they have a poll showing he’s ahead, but not by much.  On the air, Mike Duffy reported  the CTV  poll shows them “neck in neck”.

In Papineau, a CROP poll puts Justin Trudeau ahead — but he’s worried. The Bloc is throwing the kitchen sink at him. What’s left of the nationalist movement  staged a mean demo which conjured Levesque’s infamous attack on his father for not being a real Quebecer with a name like Elliott. One campaign enemy has stolen an image from the Great War TV series and made postcard sized stickers.  Running in Papineau, ironically  Trudeau played a an officer named Papineau, of the famous nationalist family. The stickers   attempt to depict Justin as a fascist militarist. They are plastering polls and  bus shelters across the riding.  If the best they can muster are ad hominum attacks, they are stupid and desperate. Why go after “the son of” when Justin’s surrealist web page leaves him open to the worst kind of attack ==derision.  But right wing nationalists have never been talented ironists. In fact, the famous internet skit which shows blockheaded English bureacrats confused by the French word word for  seal “phoque” was a glimmering opportunity to team up with English speaking artists also being savaged by the cuts. Instead, while the skit was clever, it was intellectually lazy. The Harper heritage bureaucrats carrying out his marching orders want blood on the floor, French and English.