On the street, I'm getting a better early response than I anticipated. I had conditioned myself to meet almost no-one but Conservative supporters. But I find that business owners don't feel that they've been heard in Ottawa, that many who supported the previous MP did so out of personal loyalty, not loyalty to the Conservative party, and that people are hungering for a change.
I attended an event today which was attended by about 100 NDP and Green supporters. Five people, all NDP members and one key organizer told me that I would have their vote. They're following the key element of Jack Layton's advice "I'm asking you to [join with me to] defeat Stephen Harper, regardless of who you've voted for in the past." Although Mr. Layton intended that advice to encourage more people to vote NDP in key ridings, his supporters here know that the main chance is to vote Liberal. They're hearing it as "I'm asking you to defeat Stephen Harper, regardless of who you've voted for in the past." And they've chosen to vote for me.
Campaign Director Allie and I got out of the office late last night, as usual, and went looking for dinner at 10:30 in the evening. Just down Main Street we went into the parking lot at a very popular Greek restaurant, hoping against hope that they would still be open. There were three members of the restaurant staff outside in the alley having a smoke - when we asked if they were still open, we were initially told no - when Allie said that we were on the Liberal campaign, that we'd been there the night before, that we were tired and starving, one person hollered into the kitchen to get one chicken souvlaki and one shoulder of lamb on the go, and we were told that there would be no problem, just go on in.
One of the staff then said to me. "But you know, I don't think much of that guy, your leader, you know, what's his name?" "Michael Ignatieff", I said. "Yeah, that's the guy, I don't like him." "Why not?" said I. "Well, I hear from a lot of people that they don't like him." "Where do you think they got their information?" I asked. "Well, I don't know". "So," I said, "what if I opened a restaurant across the street here and put up a great big screen and ran ads over and over and over again saying that your restaurant served plodge, that the owners didn't care about the customers, just about personal profit, that everyone who ate here got sick, and just said that over and over again. Would that be a good way for a lot of people to form an opinion of you guys?" And everybody laughed, and one young man said "Well, he's got my vote." Not so hard, really. One or one thousand at a time.
Time to get the vote out.
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