Campaign 2011

What leverage will Layton’s much larger caucus have?

No wild partying here at Jack Layton’s headquarters. It’s odd, given what’s happened. New Democrats were cheering as the results flowed in, pushing them up into the triple digits. Since them, the din has died down. Perhaps the corresponding rise of the Conservatives into majority territory is what’s keeping them from cutting loose.

Greetings from NDP headquarters here in the basement of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, down near Lake Ontario, where the chants of N-D-P, N-D-P have just broken out for the first time. The crowd has been a bit cautious, it seems to me, about letting a celebratory mood take hold prematurely, lest sky-high expectations be brought down to earth. Doesn’t seem like they have much to worry about, though. The room, capacity about 2,000, is only now starting to really fill up. More as the evening unfolds.

Jack Layton talked up pocketbook pressures on the middle class in every speech

The NDP leader stops by Maclean’s in Toronto for a wide-ranging discussion

The Liberals have been making a late-campaign push to turn Stephen Harper’s past remarks about health care into a big election issue, and it’s hard to blame them. Those painstakingly selected quotes from Harper are certainly more germane to an actual policy file than any of miscellaneous old Michael Ignatieff lines the Conservatives creatively cut and paste into their attack ads.

It shouldn’t matter, but it probably will

Flashback to late in the 2004 election campaign

All through this campaign, Michael Ignatieff has taken the dual risk of speaking without a prepared text and answering many questions that haven’t been scripted from individuals who haven’t been screened and just happened to raise a hand in the crowd that’s turned out to hear him.

Rarely has the geography of a leaders’ debate seemed so significant

As always, the big thing to watch for in tonight’s leaders’ debate is a “knockout punch.” This is, of course, when one leader delivers a line so devastating that his rival can’t possibly recover. The key thing to remember is that this never occurs. Thus, the debate-watcher will also want to keep an eye peeled for these other possibilities:

Health policy needs closer scrutiny