Conservative Leader Stephen Harper will sharpen his attacks on Stéphane Dion starting today, as new polls show the Liberal Leader is failing to connect with voters or talk about the issues that mean the most to them.
Several senior Liberals have expressed serious concern that the first week of the campaign went poorly for Mr. Dion and could be the sign of an electoral disaster to come. Those concerns were highlighted by a Strategic Counsel poll showing Mr. Dion trailing both NDP Leader Jack Layton and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May in people's expectations in key battleground ridings in Ontario and British Columbia.
While the Liberal and Conservative leaders usually get the most attention in an election campaign, voters in those battlegrounds said Mr. Dion was just one of many opposition voices talking about the issues they care about.
"Mr. Dion still seems to have a hard time getting a word in edgewise in this conversation," said Peter Donolo, a partner with the Strategic Counsel, which conducted the poll for The Globe and Mail and CTV.
Mr. Harper will spend this week in ridings he thinks the Tories can win in Ontario and Quebec, the third battleground in his search for a majority, portraying Mr. Dion as incapable of guiding the economy through uncertain times when he still owes money for his 2006 campaign for the Liberal leadership.
He will also turn up the heat on the NDP and the Greens, partly in recognition that as support for the Liberal Party is weakening, those two parties will pose a greater threat, a senior campaign official said yesterday.
Mr. Dion spent the first week of the campaign for the Oct. 14 election talking about a number of different policies and proposals, but much of the attention was focused on his "Green Shift," which has remained an abstract concept for many voters. It was not until Friday, when Mr. Dion proposed to help homeowners pay for energy-saving retrofits of their home, that he "was really talking about what's in it for the average citizen," Mr. Donolo said.
Mr. Harper, meanwhile, has been hammering away on the economy, and casting Mr. Dion's Green Shift as a risky venture in uncertain economic times.
"It's the big question of the campaign. Is the green issue the dominant issue, or is it the economy? And the indications are that it's the economy," Mr. Donolo said.
Mr. Harper said over the weekend he thinks Canadians have become more conservative over the past two decades. But, he added, they're still not as right-wing as his party, which means it must moderate its policies in order to govern.
Greg Lyle, managing director of polling firm Innovative Research Group, said both the Conservative Party and NDP have seized the initiative to assert their version of a "ballot question" they want voters to ask themselves when they head to the polls, but the Liberals have not.
"Stephen Harper wants people to vote on who's the best economic manager for these difficult economic times. And if they do, he's going to kick ass," Mr. Lyle said. Mr. Lyle said the NDP has also framed a ballot question, as boardroom tables versus kitchen tables: "Do you want a strong leader that cares about you?"
Mr. Dion, meanwhile, has struggled to define his choice for voters, and does not appear to have "his" ballot question, or even a consistent stump-speech line that says what the election is about, in his eyes. "Harper's got one. Layton's got one. There's no line like that in Stéphane Dion's speech," Mr. Lyle said.
