Canada autumn election more likely
Canada's minority Conservative government will more likely call an autumn election, after meetings with opposition leaders failed to find common ground on Saturday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's spokesman said.
"It's looking more likely than it was before these meetings," the prime minister's spokesman, Kory Teneycke, told reporters outside Harper's residence after the second of two meetings with opposition leaders.
Harper, elected with a minority of seats in Parliament in January 2006, had asked for the meetings to see if any of the three opposition parties would agree to cooperate.
He has suggested that if not, he would have Parliament dissolved next week for an Oct 14 election.
Jack Layton, leader of the leftist New Democratic Party, said after meeting Harper that his party continued to have no confidence in the government.
He also gave a readout of the prime minister's view, saying of Harper: "He said that he doubted that there was any common ground."
The prime minister reached a similar conclusion after meeting Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe on Friday and does not expect any cooperation from Liberal leader Stephane Dion, head of Canada's largest political party, Teneycke said.
By some counts, Harper's is already the longest minority government in Canadian history. When Canadian minority governments are new, opposition parties typically are unwilling to bring them down as the people just spoke at the ballot box.
But Harper's team has concluded that now all three opposition parties would vote to topple him so there might as well be an election now to give a government, even if not his, a clear mandate to steer Canada through rough economic waters.
Some pundits also suggest he may want to go now before any worse news emerges, either economic or political.
It is not that Harper has particularly good polling numbers. An Ipsos Reid poll issued on Saturday put the Conservatives only 2 points ahead of the Liberals - 33 percent to 31 percent - and a Nanos survey the day before had them 2 points behind.
"At least at the start, this is going to be a very, very tight election campaign," Ipsos Reid pollster Darrell Bricker told the National Post newspaper.
The Ipsos poll also showed 16 percent supporting the New Democrats and 10 percent for the Green Party.
The Greens are normally also-rans but got a big boost on Saturday when an independent member of Parliament joined the party, bolstering the party's bid to join election debates.
Agencies
(China Daily 09/01/2008 page7)
