NDP leader Layton rejects idea of strategic voting to stop Conservative majority

<p>SAINT JOHN, N.B. – Jack Layton sat down at a piano Monday and launched into an impromptu jazz version of “Hit the Road Jack.”</p> <p>”I always play it before someone else does,” he said, laughing, as he brushed off an encore request.</p> <p>There’s no doubt the NDP leader is hitting the road on the last week of the election campaign with a lot more spring in his step.</p> <p>Recent polls show the New Democrats surging in support in several areas of Canada, including Quebec, making these last days ahead of the May 2 vote crucial for him and his party.</p> <p>That momentum has some questioning whether the NDP would divide left-leaning support and effectively hand Stephen Harper’s Conservatives a long-awaited majority government.</p> <p>Layton bristled at that question Monday during a campaign stop at the same hotel Saint John, N.B., hotel where he played the piano.</p> <p>”This is the absurd proposal that somehow you don’t really have a choice but to vote for the one or other of the two old-line parties,” he said.</p> <p>Besides, he wouldn’t suggest the Liberal alternative, Layton said.</p> <p>”I don’t recommend that people vote for a party that has supported Stephen Harper 100 times in the last two-and-a-half years,” he said. “What sense would that make?”</p> <p>On the issue of Quebec, where support has risen dramatically for the NDP in the last decade, Layton said it appears Quebecers are looking for a choice.</p> <p>As if to accentuate that choice, Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe brought a well-known separatist warhorse – Jacques Parizeau – out on the campaign trail Monday.</p> <p>Speaking at a Bloc rally near Montreal, Parizeau urged Parti Quebecois members to stoke support for their separatist cousins.</p> <p>The former Quebec premier led sovereigntist forces in the 1995 referendum and his appearance seemed designed to rejuvenate Bloc support.</p> <p>Layton said that makes the choice even clearer.</p> <p>”We’re offering something new. We’re offering a real choice to Quebecers and all Canadians,” he said.</p> <p>”The Bloc Quebecois offers a different choice. Ours is new, ours talks about bringing people together instead of dividing people.”</p> <p>Both the Conservatives and Liberals have recently unleashed attack ads targeting the NDP.</p> <p>The latest Liberal ad takes aim at both Layton and Harper, deriding them as two sides of the same coin.</p> <p>It accuses Layton of teaming up with Harper in 2005 to torpedo a national daycare plan under the previous Liberal government.</p> <p>”And Layton? He’d jack up your taxes to pay for $70 billion in new spending,” the ad claims.</p> <p>The Liberals have also attacked the NDP’s claim that they could generate billions of dollars almost immediately from a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gases which has yet to be set up.</p> <p>But Layton isn’t backing away from the plan. </p> <p>”It’s sufficiently popular that even the Liberals copied that element of it,” he said. “We’re very optimistic that it can be implemented in a timely way.”</p> <p>He said the New Democrats would take a fiscally responsible approach and if something doesn’t bring in enough revenue, then something else will have to be cut.</p> <p>”Our spending will always be calibrated to the revenues that are coming in and I think Canadians expect to see that,” he said.</p> <p>It was Layton’s first New Brunswick stop in this campaign. The NDP holds only one of the province’s 10 seats.</p> <p>About 300 people packed a pier on the Saint John waterfront to see Layton, who – despite his recent hip surgery – bounced on his toes to try to assess the size of the crowd.</p> <p>Layton kept his Quebec momentum going at a noisy Gatineau rally Monday night where about 500 people cheered as he announced improvements for pay equity for women.</p> <p>”I will reverse Stephen Harper on pay equity. I will improve EI benefits for parental leave,” he said.</p> <p>Women are working harder to balance work and home, but they still make only 71 cents for every dollar earned by men, Layton said.</p> <p>”And I will work to get more women elected to the House of Commons,” he promised to loud cheers.</p>