Ignatieff in last-ditch bid to rescue party

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While Stephen Harper crossed the country Sunday and Jack Layton barnstormed from Montreal to Toronto, Michael Ignatieff spent the last day of this election campaign circling the wagons around Toronto, attempting to rescue his party from a historic drubbing.

The gravity of the situation was made most clear when the Liberal leader found himself fending off question after question from reporters about whether he plans to stay on as leader of the party after the election.

"I'm committing to stay, I'm committed to fight, and I'm here to win on the second of May," he declared, though he acknowledged that "the Liberal Party is a democratic institution," which has the right to replace him as leader if its members so choose.

The Liberals' largest contingent of MPs comes from Toronto and the surrounding communities of the 905, named after its area code.

Mr. Ignatieff started the day in Markham with a tree planting and then travelled to the riding of Ajax-Pickering, where incumbent MP Mark Holland is in a tough fight against a star Conservative candidate, Chris Alexander.

From there the tour was to carry on to campaign stops in Toronto, Thornhill and Maple, in Vaughan. Though the Liberals point out that they continue to campaign in ridings they hope to take from the Tories, the clear implication was that Mr. Ignatieff was devoting this day to Toronto and environs because here the party was in the most danger of losses.

With their poll numbers slumping below where they were in 2008, the Liberals risk losing seats to the Conservatives in the edge cities around Toronto - where a rising NDP could drain Liberal support, allowing the Tories to come up the middle - and in downtown Toronto itself, where the New Democrats are threatening to take seats from the Liberals in the city centre.

Mr. Ignatieff derided Stephen Harper for urging Liberal supporters to vote Conservative to head off an NDP surge.

"Stephen Harper has just shown chutzpah of an astounding kind," he said. "Mr. Harper hates everything the Liberal Party stands for."

As for Jack Layton, who threatens to drive the Liberals into third-party status, Mr. Ignatieff conceded: "He's got a fantastic smile, I'll give him that ... But the question every Canadian has to ask is what's behind the smile." And the answer, he said, is "not much, folks."

Some Liberal organizers admit that it is almost inevitable that the Liberals will lose the election. How big a loss they will suffer will depend on vote splits that are simply impossible to predict in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.

But Mr. Ignatieff will make no such concessions, at least in public.

"Turn the TV off, turn the radio off, put the papers aside and decide what kind of Canada you want," he urged voters.

Liberal supporters believe in their bones that most Canadians favour a fiscally responsible, socially progressive Canada, the Canada that their party built over the course of a century.

For the life of them, they can't understand why so few of them want that this time.