..but did she do as well as the polling firm Ekos has her and the Greens in Ontario?

Liberals 33, Cons. 33, NDP 20,  Green 15

I think thats the largest # I’ve seen the Greens have in Ontario from any polling firm. If you’ve been following the Ekos daily poll, they would seem to be pulling it from all parties.  So the question would be a) How accurate is Ekos methodology, and b) Is it hard or soft support for the Greens? With regards to the 2nd question, Ekos said they found that 74% of Green Party voters would “not likely” change their vote, while 17% said “likely” and 9% said “somewhat likely”.

The next question asks if they knew the Conservatives would win a majority government, would they change their vote to try and stop it, and 30% of Greens voters said they would (though I question the poll’s wording here, as one can never truly KNOW about voting night). Of course, if the polls stay the same, and it appears there is a minority government of whatever stripe,  the likelihood of them changing their vote is even more remote.

Oh, and as with other polls, Ekos also shows a narrowing down to 7% between the Cons and the Liberals, the lowest margin they’ve had since the election writ was dropped. As with Decima and Nanos, they show the Cons dropping into the teens in Quebec.

This is an amusing story and typical of how John Baird operates (like a clown). Avaaz.ca officially launched their campaign today taking on the Harper government’s inactivity on climate change. Avaaz falls under third-party status during an Canadian election whereby a third party is allowed to spend a maximum of 150 grand on a national scale during the election period.

The news conference itself was rather ho-hum according to Kady O’Malley, at least until one of John Baird’s staffers - the Environment Minister and one of the Conservative MP’s that Avaaz is going to be targeting in their ad campaign - showed up with some literature:

…a stack of freshly printed press releases bearing the fabulously evocative headline: “SHADOWY FOREIGN ORGANIZATION ATTEMPTING TO INFLUENCE CANADIAN ELECTION” - which would be awesome enough all on its own, but the subhead made it even better: Apparently - their words, not mine - a “Wall Street Billionaire” is “bankrolling [the] campaign”. What Wall Street Billionaire might that be? Oh, my ears and whiskers, you’ll never guess — the man whose very existence can spark six American C/conservative conspiracy theories before breakfast: George Soros.

Baird’s campaign charged that Avaaz was a “foreign organization” and filed an official complaint with Elections Canada trying to bar them from launching their ad campaign. Problem for them was, as Kady O’Malley explains in a later update - the Avaaz folks already had their i’s dotted and their t’s crossed, and Elections Canada didn’t think they were shadowy OR foreign and perfectly legal within Canadian election laws:

In fact, the Avaaz campaign is exclusively run and funded by Canadians, and has been fully reviewed and registered as a legitimate third party by Elections Canada and is listed on its website. Avaaz pro actively initiated full consultations with Elections Canada lawyers, who approved the application. “Our campaign is of, by, and for Canadians, and strictly Canadian money is being used, that’s verified by an auditor registered with Elections Canada”, said Avaaz Executive Director Ricken Patel. “We have been very careful about this, to even go beyond normal procedure to discuss our campaign with Elections Canada lawyers, and we are 100% in compliance with Canadian law.”

Furthermore, they talked to Baird’s staff about their complaints and encouraged them to ask Elections Canada, but they didn’t bother, and decide to distribute their press releases anyhow.

Cue the Conservative outrage and whining again about how Elections Canada is “biased” against the Conservatives, or how they’re now involved in a conspiracy with a bunch of shadowy foreigners from Avaaz (who happen to have, by the way, an office in Ottawa). You can see this coming a mile away, can’t you?

Disgraceful and shocking:

Four months before the Maple Leaf outbreak started claiming lives, Canada’s food safety agency quietly dropped its rule requiring meat-processing companies to alert the agency about listeria-tainted meat, a Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found…Before April 1, if a company preparing meat for sale to the public had a positive test showing listeria it “would have had to have been, not only brought to the (federal) inspector’s attention, but the inspector would have been involved in overseeing the cleanup,” says Bob Kingston, head of the union that represents Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) inspectors…The inspection agency confirmed to the Star/CBC that there is currently no onus on companies to alert inspectors about positive bacterial results. The change came as part of a federal decision to allow companies to write their own food safety plans, with federal approval.

As a result of this Harper-Conservative initiated deregulation and loosening of the rules, due to his ideological opposition to anything remotely to do with the federal government having any oversight, we’ve probably had far more deaths (now up to 20) then might have been the case, had the original rules been in place requiring a company to report any instances of listeria-affected meat to the federal authorities.

Again, the parallels to the tainted water tragedy of Walkerton and the attitudes and policies of the provincial Conservative government of Mike Harris toward government oversight is very striking. This is yet more evidence that Harper’s Conservative deregulation of health food safety has partly been responsible for this Listeriosis health crisis and tragedy.

(H/T Impolitical)

Bouquets of Gray (run by the blogger who ran Buckets of Grewal, and who was noted for his analysis of that tape of Gurmant Grewal and the discovery that it had been doctored) and Jerad Gallinger over at his site have found another apparent instance of Harper and/or his speech writers heavily copying from someone else - and this time they liked the guy’s stuff so much, they copied it from TWO separate essays and rolled it into one Harper speech:

Buckets explains this side-by-side comparison:

To the right is a section of his (Harper) speech on the Canadian Wheat Board (Nov. 6, 2002); it copies sections from two essays by Craig Docksteader of The Prairie Policy Centre, a rightwing think tank. (One written in 1998 with the Harper-parallels in yellow, and one in 2002, green).

In the first instance of plagiarism that was discovered in Harper’s involving his support for the Iraq war that copied Australian PM John Howard’s address, one of Harper’s former staffers took the fall. In the 2nd instance, where it was found  that parts of former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s speech had been lifted,  no staffer was blamed, but Harper dismissed that as being “boilerplate” phrases that are used all of the time and which he merely reused in his opinion.

Now we have this long speech that is a lot more then “mere boilerplate” - it appears to be wholesale copying. What explanation does Harper have for this? What does this say about Harper?  And what about the consequences?  Current Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden had his presidential run in 1988 scuppered by a revelation that he had lifted phrases and used them in a campaign speech, so the Conservative defenders cannot be so quick to try and brush this off, as I’ve seen some try to do.

As j-rad says:

Reporters have been fired and students expelled for less egregious cases of copying. Whether the Prime Minister will hold himself to the same standard as a second-year English major remains to be seen.

Harper will not fire himself - but the Canadian electorate can do so.

Do you like Nanos? I like Nanos:

CPAC-Nanos Daily Election Tracking CP 34, LP 30, NDP 19, BQ 10, GP 7 (ending October 4)

If one looks at the regional polls today, we see that the Liberals have taken a decisive lead in Atlantic Canada (not a particular surprise), but the Liberals have now risen to 28% in Quebec, still behind the BQ by a good margin, but well in front of the Conservatives, who continue their nosedive with a 16% showing today. As for Ontario, the Liberals have narrowly edged ahead here within the MOE, and they’re going to need to extend that gap to have any hope of forming a minority government.

The next thing to watch is to see if the media bother to report on Nanos. I’ve speculated that many of the major dailies and tv media are reluctant to report other polls findings, because many of them have agreements with polling companies to do polls exclusively for them.. so you’ll not often see other polls reported on - particularly if it contradicts what their particular poll is finding. But, I think it’s the media’s duty to at least sidetrack their narrative of the Conservatives running away with this race to at least report that the pollster who got it right the past 2 elections is showing a slightly different finding.

Decima is showing a tightening as well - just not as dramatic as of yet - but most are saying the Conservative majority is in peril. That’s heartening news for the progressives out there, but we can’t let up now. We must keep working to boot these Conservatives right out of office. They are a toxic party.

UPDATE: The analysis from Nik Nanos:

The fallout from the French and English debates shows the previous pre-debate 10 point Conservative margin is now four percentage points. Tracking shows incremental movement in favour of the Liberals and Stephane Dion. Dion registered his highest score as the person Canadians think would make the best Prime Minsiter at 20% although he still trails Stephen Harper by 12 points.

His more detailed analysis is on CPAC’s Dale Goldhawk show tonight at 7 pm (EST). It should be very interesting to listen to.

UPDATE 2@ 3:30 pm: Well, at least 1 member of the media has noticed the race is tightening: Andrew Coyne, with a title that really brought a smile to my face: The Tories are in trouble

Well, we have another story in today’s Toronto Star over vandalism targeting Liberal supporters in that city:

Toronto police patrolled a midtown area overnight, after vandals cut brake lines on at least 10 cars parked at homes with Liberal election signs on their lawns. Affected residents live in the riding of St. Paul’s, in a swath of the city around Eglinton Ave. between Bathurst St. and Mount Pleasant Rd., and had Carolyn Bennett signs on their property. The cars were also damaged in other ways; some were scratched and keyed with L signs. Phone and cable lines of some homes were cut.

This is chilling, because this is EXACTLY what was done to Guelph Liberal supporters during the Guelph byelection campaign. Here are some pictures in the Guelph vandalism blogpost I did on that particular story.

This appears to be a concerted campaign of intimidation tactics aimed at Liberal voters. Call me paranoid, but I find it highly suspicious that the tactics would be almost the same in both cities (no spray-painting of houses was done in Toronto apparently). Do I blame any formal organized political party for actively doing this? Of course not, but it appears some folks are taking things into their own hands. I also mirror what Impolitical said at her blogsite; these disgusting criminal acts will not work at intimidation of those of us proud to call ourselves Liberals.

UPDATE @ 11:00 am: A press release sent to me from the Carolyn Bennett campaign indicates there was graffiti spray-painted at the Toronto homes as well. One of Ms Bennett’s campaign workers informs me that one house had spray-painted on it “B.Rae lies” and another said “McGuinty lies”.

Apparently, we’ve got people who can’t tell the difference between federal and provincial levels of government or the people running in them.

UPDATE 2 @ 11:50 am: The official Carolyn Bennett press release posted at the Liberal website talking about this despicable incident.

UPDATE 3 @ 12:38 pm: David Graham, who is a Guelph blogger, notes another similarity in this pattern:

To add to the “coincidence,” the Guelph attack took place exactly eleven days before by-election voting day, and the Toronto attack took place exactly eleven days before the general election voting day

UPDATE 4 @ 5:46pm: Impolitical now has a blog up that says Parkdale-High Park Liberal supporters were also targeted. This is getting ugly.

The press release here. The song they recorded is here. A who’s who of the Canadian musical scene:

The Canadian artists who rallied together for this effort include: K-OS, Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies, Ben Kowalewicz of Billy Talent, Adam Gontier of Three Days Grace, Sarah Harmer, Hawksley Workman, Jason Collett of Broken Social Scene, Darren Dumas of The Salads and the Arts Offstage Choir under the direction of David Reed.

They’ll also be sending this recording to Canadian radio stations and to get it played prior to the October 14th vote.

Well now, this totally made my day. The Cons. have dropped a couple, and the Liberals have surged with a +4 from yesterday:

Conservatives: 35 (-2)
Liberals : 30 (+4)
NDP: 18 (-1)
Greens: 10 (+1)
Bloc Quebecois: 9 (-)

It appears much of the momentum comes in Quebec, where the Liberals are up 7 points from yesterday and into 2nd place in that province, perhaps reflecting Dion’s perceived strong showing and the declared winner of the French language debate. There is also upward movement in Ontario. The Conservatives on the other hand dropped 4 in Quebec and are down 3 in Ontario.

I’m going to guess partly the French language debate, and perhaps the first indications of the plagiarism scandal taking effect is part of this Liberal bounce and the Con slump. I know this may wreck most of the media’s meme that the race is all but over, but who knows, perhaps some will now admit there is still a race.

UPDATE: Look at Nanos leadership chart:

Harper 79 (-16)
Dion 71 (+40)
Layton 48 (-12)

Harper has lost his significant advantage, and Dion has shot up there. That bodes well. Those leadership numbers are an eye-opener, particularly the meteoric rise of Dion’s. I guess some people think he really IS a leader, after all, once they got to see the real Dion and not the caricature that the Cons did of him.

- Tonight at 8pm, Dan McTeague will be hosting a townhall meeting on energy prices. The location is here at a web 2.0 enabled site. Dan will be streaming live on an internet video feed. This is probably the first time a politician in Canada has done something like this. They are taking questions at votemcteague.ca, and welcome all enquiries.

- Best quip of the English language debate last night: Elizabeth May quietly saying “Where is it?” when Harper urged people to study the Conservatives platform. A close second was when Dion said he knew he has a very strong French accent, but that he knows he speaks the truth better in both languages than Harper.

- As for the debate itself, Dion appeared to hold his own last night, but I’m a Liberal partisan, so I’m biased in my assertion. However, I thought one of his better retorts was in response to Jack Layton. Jack asked him whether he’d cooperate with provinces who disagreed with his carbon tax and tax shifting. Dion’s reply was of course, but the Canadian voters are the ones who vote for me, not the provinces. As a Trudeau-type federalist, I was very pleased to hear that from a Canadian federal politician.

- Getting back to Harper urging Canadians to studying the Conservatives platform, as of last night, that has so far consisted of throwing 14 year old kids in jail for up to life in prison (in contravention of the Canadian Supreme Court with the possibility that Harper will use the Notwithstanding Clause in the Charter of Rights to force it through), money for children’s arts (as an apparent attempt to quell the furore in Quebec over those other arts funding cuts), and Harper reminding people he was leaving Afghanistan in 2011. So we’ve got 3 policy releases, unless there are another 1 or 2 I haven’t remembered. Regardless, it’s very skimpy what they’ve released so far in actual substantial policy measures.

So, I’ll read your platform when you release it, Steve, as others have also said in asking where the Conservative platform is. Even if it does get released in the next day or so, it is deceptive and dishonest that we now have 2 weeks or less left in this election campaign without it being released. Not only are the Conservatives hiding their candidates from debates, but they’re hiding their platform.

The Liberal War Room has been quick to pounce on these Harper plagiarism revelations:

Remember to visit BushHarper.com to see more of Harper copying his American Idol, George Bush in deeds as well as words.

Oh.. and don’t forget this video from Creative Revolution of some more copying Harper did from his American Republican conservative friends on the “fundamentals of the economy being strong” line conservatives like to use.