Canadian Federal Election call expected Sunday

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http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/490633

THE CANADIAN PRESS
and Toronto Star staff

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper will launch a federal election campaign Sunday with a visit to the Governor General, sources have told The Canadian Press.
Harper is set to meet with Michaelle Jean at 9 a.m. ET and ask her to dissolve Canada’s 39th Parliament, with an election on Oct. 14, the sources said.

Although the call violates the spirit of Harper’s own fixed-election date law that sets the next vote a year from now, the prime minister will argue that he has lost the confidence of Parliament.

Today in Winnipeg, Liberal leader Stephane Dion cut short the Liberal caucus meeting and sent MPs home to prepare for the expected election.

Dion met with his caucus this morning but cancelled a formal wrap-up address that had been scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Instead, he told the MPs that they should head back to their ridings right away to prepare for the upcoming campaign.

The conference began Tuesday but Wednesday was the high point, with regional caucus meetings and a keynote address to the assembled MPs and senators by Dion at mid-day. With the election looming, many MPs decided to leave on Wednesday night.

Media reports this morning confirmed the likelihood that Prime Minister Stephen Harper would set an election campaign in motion on Sunday.

"The next election will be one of the most crucial ones in the history of Canada" because of the vast differences in policy between the Conservatives and the Liberals, Dion told the media.

He was planning to fly to Edmonton to hold a town hall meeting on Friday.

The Conservatives, elected Jan. 23, 2006, go into this campaign having managed the third-longest parliamentary minority in federal history — and the longest since the 1920s.

At a pre-election event in Toronto today, New Democrat leader Jack Layton promised a long list of changes - from passing consumer protection laws to a national pharmacare plan - with a focus on the economy, health and the environment.

Layton talked about hope and change and admitted he felt energized by the U.S. presidential campaign and the message put forward by Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

He even called their plans for the environment "identical".

The name he did not mention - even when a reporter called him on it - was that of Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

Layton said he is focused on Harper and not the other candidates for his job as prime minister.

Harper’s Conservatives ended almost 13 years of Liberal government on Jan. 23, 2006, by claiming 36 per cent of the popular vote.

The prime minister was huddling with his cabinet today for a pre-election meeting in Meech Lake, Que.

A number of strategic concerns appear to have inspired Harper to head to the polls early.

With the economy wavering, the election could already be over by the time the government posts its next set of fiscal statistics on the quarterly deficit or surplus.

That eliminates the possibility of Harper’s campaign being torpedoed by headlines about an unexpected federal deficit.

An immediate campaign would also cancel byelections set for next week. It would allow for a vote to be held before a Francophonie leaders’ summit in Quebec City.

And, perhaps more importantly, it would conclude before the U.S. presidential election in November.

One of the U.S. candidates — Barack Obama — had his campaign undermined by the leak of a Canadian diplomatic memo last winter.

That incident would be more likely to resurface on the Canadian campaign trail if Obama happened to be elected president before Canadians voted.

An election on Oct. 14 would pre-empt that possibility.

But it would also place the prime minister in conflict with his own words two years ago, when he hailed his fixed-election law as a key plank in his promise to reform Canadian democracy.

“Fixed election dates stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar,” he said soon after taking office in 2006.

“Hopefully in the next election we can run on our record and we won’t need the manipulation of the electoral calendar.”

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Time to get Harper out of power. This guy is a dictator plain and simple. He is turning back the clock to the Mulroney days and we are going to be paying for it for years to come.

- Wants to tell us what we can and can't do with our bodies (steroids, etc.) and wants to strengthen those laws

- Against safe injection sites for drug users which provides clean needles and guides addicts to places that help them, and these sites have been lowering HIV caused by shared needles and these sites have been lowering addiction rates

- Kicks out Members of Parliament from his party if they speak to the media

- Offered "monetary considerations" (insurance policy) to a dying independent MP for his vote in parliament

- Embarrasment on the world stage when it came to the Olympics and the environment

- Goes against his own free market beliefs by giving bail outs to Ford this week, just prior to this election call (buying votes are we, Mr. Harper?)

- His finance minster tells the world that Ontario (where I am from) is not a good place to invest in. Ontario has always been anti-Conservative Party and whenever the Conservative Party is in power, they always pick fights with Ontario politicians.

- Has a number of politicians under his wing that were from the failed Harris regime

- This election call is against his own fixed election date law (read the last two lines of the article)

- Tried to influence the current US election by releasing diplomatic memos to undermine Obama's election campaign (as stated in the article)

- Will keep our troops in Afghanistan as long as Bush/McCain tell him to

- Almost has the government in deficit spending, after years of surpluses that helped reduce the federal debt and prevent future generations from paying for our past over spending

- Has been running campaign style TV and radio ads ever since he took office to make the opposition look bad

Bush Jr. is simply awful and he HAS to go if Canada wants to get back to economic growth and get back our personal freedoms.