Just 168 Hours Until it's All Over

Ignatieff defends, Layton parties, Duceppe worries, and Harper cruises into the campaign's last week (you'll miss it when it's over, we swear).

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff sat down with The Globe and Mail's editorial board to make his case for prime minister as he battles the NDP to his left and victory-bound Conservatives to the right. The board finds that if nothing else, Ignatieff distinguished his party's don't-rock-the-boat platform from the NDP's as a more mature and realistic option for undecided left-leaning voters. “They may be chasing some of the same votes, but they are not interchangeable,” say the editorialists. “The Liberals remain a welcome antidote to ideological politics.” But that's not a full-fledged endorsement, especially as their approval seems more for Iggy's party than the man himself – the inverse of what the editorialists feel about Jack Layton.

For his part, Layton spent the weekend hosting a rousing rally in the Montreal riding held by Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe, and Tasha Kheiriddin of the National Post thinks the bonanza over Layton could be the death knell for Duceppe & Co. “For 20 years, soft nationalists parked their votes with the Bloc. But it appears that the party has finally run out of things to say,” says Kheiriddin. And that swath of leftist Quebecers, turned off by Tory policies and Liberal corruption, has found a natural home with the NDP. Although she's far from a bleeding heart, Kheiriddin hopes Layton can deliver “our country a great gift: breaking the back of the party which has, for far too long, done nothing to serve the interests of Canada – or Quebec.”

But that NDP surge has bypassed vote-rich Ontario, a trend that Paul Wells of Maclean's predicts will translate into a victory for Stephen Harper and his Conservatives come May 2. In combing through a raft of poll numbers, Wells decides that the lingering stench of Bob Rae's provincial NDP government 20 years ago is still keeping Upper Canadians from joining the Layton love-in. “Ontario is the only region of the country where NDP support is no higher than on the day of the English-language debate,” concludes Wells. Combined with stagnant numbers for the Liberals in that province, Wells says the seas are ripe for the Conservatives to finally catch their white whale of a majority.