Canada election 2008 campaign Thanksgiving wrap up

Campaigning for Canada's national election will end Monday night in British Columbia, home to numerous "Battleground Ridings" in a tight, unpredictable contest to win a majority or at least a plurality of seats in the House of Commons.

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain have ignored America's "Left Coast" in favor of repeated appearances in down-on-their-luck cities in the Ohio Valley, and in such perceived battlegrounds as New Mexico.

By contrast, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's last cross-country swing will bring him to the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, where ruling Conservatives hope to unseat Raymond Chan, the incumbent Liberal member of parliament.

Dion will appear at a hotel near the Vancouver Airport to boost Chan, and argue that progressive voters should ignore other left-of-center parties and unite behind the Liberals.

The election is Tuesday.

Shares began to plummet and Harper retooled his campaign in a bid to persuade Canadians that only he could manage the country in such troubled times.

"(We have) a plan that in the midst of this world financial crisis has kept our economy creating jobs, kept our budgets balanced and kept your bank accounts safe and secure," he told a rally in Cornwall, Prince Edward Island on Monday.

Harper has dismissed opposition calls for major government spending programs.

The election is the third in four years and -- according to virtually every poll over the last month -- will produce Canada's third successive minority government.

Mr Harper has come under sustained criticism amid perceptions he has not shown enough empathy with Canadians who have lost money during the upheaval on the stock markets, says the BBC's Lee Carter in Toronto.

He has reworked his message to try to convince Canadians that he is the one to be at the helm of the economy in such difficult times.

"At this crucial moment for our economy we need a realistic and credible plan to protect our jobs, our savings, and our future," he told a weekend rally.

But if the economy has cast a shadow over Mr Harper's Conservatives, many voters are not finding Mr Dion any more endearing, says our correspondent.
 
Mr Dion, a French Canadian from Quebec, has been criticised as a weak leader with difficulty communicating in English.

"Stephen Harper's agenda is one of distortion and dishonesty. He may speak better English than I do. But I speak the truth better in both official languages than him," Mr Dion said recently.

It has been an election that failed to produce an issue until the United States of America sent one spiraling north from Wall Street. It remains, in fact, far more a referendum on Stephen Harper than on anything else that has come along; and it is fair to say that the Canadians aren't particularly taken with the Prime Minister even if, as polls are suggesting, they are likely to put him back in office.

It is somewhat ironic that the campaign began with a concerted effort by the Conservative image makers to turn Harper into just an ordinary guy who likes hockey, guitars and ugly sweaters - only to have him finish as the very same cold and distant personality that renders him sadly incapable of relating to the lives of ordinary Canadians. His comment that the panic and stock market crash had created "a lot of great buying opportunities" will go down in Canadian political history along with Brian Mulroney's "roll the dice" and John Turner's "I had no option."

They, too, were right. But there is a vast difference between being technically correct and politically correct.