I'm not a big fan of B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, but am consistently surprised at what an excellent campaigner he is. For example, how cool is this?:

"The premier started his day at an event with the stunning backdrop of the $143-million Park Bridge, part of a $972-million project to widen one of B.C.'s most dangerous stretches of highway.

...

Andrew Steele has written a strange article describing potential successors for Stephen Harper as Conservative leader should the government be defeated in January. I doubt that Harper is in any real danger even if he does lose a confidence vote - there are no formal mechanisms to remove him as leader in the short term and no other candidate has anything resembling Harper's rock-solid base of support within the party. 

Winner: Stephane Dion. The snide comment he got off at CTV and Roger Smith ("...you understand?") was great, almost as good as Smith and Lloyd Robertson's breathless, wounded indignation afterward.

Loser: CTV. While results were pouring in from B.C., the network cut to a lengthy, chummy interview with Bob Rae, followed up by a simultaneous interview with Michael Ignatieff. I watched the B.C. results at the bottom of the screen while Rae and Ignatieff complimented one another and played coy over their leadership intentions. Lame.

Awk-ward! Hoo boy, this exchange between a sneering Mike Duffy and a smirking Geoff Regan has to count as the most uncomfortable moment of the campaign. You have to fast-forward to the 04:40 point see it.

Since the English language debate, the media have essentially handed Stephane Dion and Jack Layton free passes to attack Harper for "not having a plan," despite that they are somewhat lacking in this respect themselves. This has led to some amusing episodes as the two leaders have tried to keep the spotlight focussed on Harper, and away from themselves. Failure to do so has led to disaster, at least for Dion.

My first thought after watching the clip is that it's hardly as bad as many are making it out to be. He's obviously tired and there's something about the question that is throwing him off. And he doesn't exactly come across as petulent or annoyed - I've seen much worse from Dion, especially in interviews from the 1990s. He actually comes off as somewhat likeable near the end of this video.

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From a recent public forum at the University of British Columbia:

"Representing Vancouver Centre was NDP candidate (and UBC professor) Michael Byers, along with Green Party candidate Adrienne Carr. Meanwhile, representing Vancouver Quadra was Joyce Murray of the Liberal Party and [UBC] Sauder law professor Deborah Meredith of the Conservatives...

Preston Manning has provided two highly...original reasons to not vote for Stephane Dion.

Reason Number 1: "Whereas Mr. Harper grew up in an accountant's household, Mr. Dion grew up in an academic's household."

...now an issue - the economy - is battering the Conservative campaign, and it's completely a result of Harper's handling of the issue.

One of the perennial criticisms of Canada's two big brokerage parties (oftentimes levelled by NDP leaders) is that they're really tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum parties: They stand for essentially the same things and govern accordingly. The 1993 federal election was supposed to have changed all that, but alot of the speculation about Harper trying to construct a moderate, centrist party raised the spectre of a return to the days of Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum.

Melanee and lots of other commentators have characterized Harper's recent defence of arts subsidies as an "amateur mistake." I'm not so sure.

The latest Tory candidate to flame out over inflammatory blog postings is Ryan Warawa in Vancouver East. No word yet on whether the party will force him to "voluntarily resign" but the events of the last week-and-a-half suggest that Warawa is on the way out.

The latest lame gotcha moment of this campaign comes courtesy of a former Conservative candidate from Toronto who suggested on his blog that allowing Canadians to carry concealed firearms might be a good way to combat violent crime, along with some other spicy opinions. Mr. Reid graciously *volunteered* to resign his candidacy after a Liberal blogger resurrected and published his online musings.

We were subjected in the 2000 election campaign to constant mockery of Alliance leader Stockwell Day's evangelical faith and beliefs. We got a glimpse of this tendency in the present campaign, this time from Gilles Duceppe:

Election campaigns are great opportunities to express outrage and rain sanctimony down on politicians. But I'm a fan of politicians being politicians. I wish that we could allow them to exist in their natural environments and behave in the ways that nature intended them to.