TORONTO—Michael Ignatieff says his party is ready to take the gloves off but he’s not looking for a fight.
The Liberal leader is on the road again, hitting up communities in Conservative-held ridings that offer hope of a turn-around in the next election. On Tuesday, he made his pitch to ethnic media at a mixer/press conference at a veterans’ hall in Markham.
The tour is a smaller repeat of his expedition across Canada last summer, which bumped up his polling numbers for a time. With a focus on ridings he hopes to reclaim, it appears Ignatieff has narrowed his intentions, perhaps responding to the uphill nature of his fight. The latest Ekos poll, released to CBC, has the Conservatives ahead by seven points: 34.5 compared to 27.3 percent of Canadians said they would vote Conservative if an election were held tomorrow.
Ignatieff brought in a few troops to help him make his case. Liberal MPs Rob Oliphant, Bryon Wilfert, and Jim Karygiannis mingled with reporters and Liberal supporters. So too did Liberal hopeful Lui Temelkovski, who held the riding for four years before Paul Calandra took it for the Conservatives in the last election.
The room was upbeat, with handshakes and friendly conversation fuelled by free Tim Hortons coffee while neat rows of chicken wraps sat ignored in tinfoil trays.
In a casual chat with Temelkovski, the candidate remarked that part of the reason for his narrow loss may simply be the more strident nature of Conservative voters.
“Through wind and snow,” he joked about how determined the Conservatives are to cast their ballot. But he believes his own staff can do the same, and is optimistic about reclaiming the riding for the red team given the relative obscurity of Calandra.
With the Conservatives making a push to penetrate urban Toronto, that might be tough. During the recent spate of infrastructure stimulus spending, the region was among those to benefit from the dole out of cash and even the local Ontario Liberal MPP on hand, Helena Jaczek, said she couldn’t complain about that.
Ignatieff arrived after the mixer was done, though the notice said he would attend the reception as well, and after hand-shaking his way to his seat at the round table, he called for a moment of silence for fallen police officer Sergeant Ryan Russell. Russell’s funeral was held just a few kilometres away the same day.
After telling the various shades of journalists present they were the connection between their ethnic communities and the democratic process, he went on to lay out the core of his ballot-box issues.
Ignatieff said he was on an 11-day tour of 20 ridings to take a simple message to Canadians.
“It starts with a question, a question that you should take to the communities that you serve. Are you better off after five years of Stephen Harper?”
Ignatieff made his case for why the answer was no, calling out the government for a high deficit and loss of international prestige.
While Ignatieff led his comments with the economy but spent much more time criticizing government’s failure to score a seat on the United Nations Security Council and its apparent disinterest in the environment.
“How many environment ministers have they had?” he asked, saying he could no longer keep track. Notably, to his right at the table was Karen Mock, who will face off against recently promoted Environment Minister Peter Kent in the next election.
[xtypo_dropcap]H[/xtypo_dropcap]e also criticized the conservatives for failing to do more to address a growing success gap between immigrant Canadians and others.
“They are stuck in bad jobs, they got trouble getting language skills, they got trouble getting into the work environment, they got trouble with credentials recognition,” he said.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has also been vocal on that issue, and has made changes to language training programs to try to get more uptake.
When asked what he had been able to do to steer the government towards more Liberal policies in the current minority parliament, Ignatieff cited his party’s opposition to C-49, a human smuggling bill that would detain would-be refugees who come in on ships associated with human smuggling.
But beyond that, the Liberal Leader suggested they couldn’t do much because Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not interested in cooperation.
“We find him difficult to work with.”
The Liberal leader also responded to recently launched Conservative attack ads.
Most of those ads focus on Ignatieff himself, attacking the Liberal Leader for comments he made regarding taxes or identifying himself as American during his previous career outside Canada.
Another ad shows the prime minister working late at Parliament, the halls silent, the lights already off, reviewing a stack of papers while the narrator tells details Canada’s relative success during the global downturn and the need to stay the course.
Ignatieff promised his rebuttal to those ads will come with force when the time comes.
“Do not doubt the Liberal Party will go on the offensive. But we will not go personal. Heaven knows we got enough to attack on the policies.”
To that end, he called out the government on buying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and building prisons rather than spending on health and education.
“We will fight, we’ll fight. You are looking at a fighter, you are looking at a team of fighters.”
But Ignatieff said they were not looking for an election, though in year-end interviews his comments suggested otherwise and his bus tour looks identical to a campaign run. With the Conservatives saying the same while also launching attack ads, it would appear neither party wants an election but sees one as unavoidable
And that may well be the case. The budget is due late February, and Harper is promising corporate tax cuts the Liberals have vehemently opposed. Even more contentious is the possibility that the budget will bring an end to public subsidies for political parties. That move, first proposed in the November 2008 budget, was the “poison pill” that prompted the opposition parties to form a coalition and try to claim control of parliament.
That coalition, incidentally, is the theme of another Conservative attack ad targeting NDP leader Jack Layton’s part in forming the coalition that included the Bloc Quebecois.
