Trudeau asks voters for majority mandate

“Yes”, Trudeau said in answer to a reporter’s question. That’s when it would get interesting. Twice as good as they do in most elections.

Former Conservative senator Hugh Segal represented the Ontario Tories in coalition talks after the 1985 election. That party would most likely be the left-leaning New Democratic Party, which at one point had the lead but has now slipped to third.

Mike Wallace, the incumbent in the southern Ontario riding of Burlington, obliges with his best theatre voice – he’s making his campaign pitch to about 15 very elderly voters, majority in wheelchairs. It wasn’t about that. “It is a surprise to me – I think it’s a wonderful surprise”.

The NDP has said they would completely revamp the NEB, which advises the federal government on all pipeline projects in Canada, and the Liberals have said they want the NEB to go back to the way it was before the Conservatives came to power. “And it did, for two years”.

Nonetheless, Trudeau on Wednesday flatly stated what party insiders have been quietly whispering for days. Similarly now, he says, the Governor General will have to have to consider who has a legitimate right to govern regardless of who wins the most seats. Mr. Harper’s spokesman said before the first party leaders’ debate in August that the Liberal leader would score points if he arrived “on stage with his trousers on”.

“He’s not driven by polls”.

CHILD-CARE BENEFITS: Harper has ripped Trudeau’s plan to cancel the government’s universal childcare benefit, saying it will cost families thousands of dollars a year. “Winners are the one that form governments”, he said.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Wednesday defended an election ad that claimed his main rival wanted to set up brothels – the latest in a series of hard-hitting commercials that have marked the campaign. “I don’t think we ought to assume that minority government is necessarily bad”.

In 2013, all the polls in BC’s pointed to a decisive NDP majority government.

Segal has a different view.

Over the past 10 years, the Canadian government has been starving the CBC.

The general feeling is if the Conservatives were heavily outnumbered, Harper would likely give up power. This would be a big change from before the election, when the Conservatives held far more BC seats than any other party, winning 21 out of 36 in 2011. That’s the view of Andrew MacDougall, who used to work as Harper’s director of communications.

“I hear it could be neck and neck in this riding, I don’t see that”.

“I think his gamble at the start of the campaign was that people know him well … if he had a long campaign to be heard out, he could make his case”, said Peter Loewen, an associate political science professor at the University of Toronto.

In a brief speech lasting approximately three minutes, Trudeau said next week’s election should be seen as an opportunity to become active Canadian citizens. “The Liberals are poised to win two or three seats in Calgary, one possibly in Edmonton”, he said.

Graves says his numbers support that. “So we can rally those voters as a block”. They are largely what we call “promiscuous progressive voters” that have been casting back and forth across the NDP and the Liberals looking for a better bet to get a new government and a progressive government.

The Conservatives argue that statement is based in part on the Liberals 2007 vote against pension income splitting, which was a policy buried in an omnibus budget bill the Liberals voted down, and that they’re going to have to find the money for their promises from somewhere.