OTTAWA – Conservative Leader Stephen Harper will campaign at a number of small businesses in B.C.’s Lower Mainland on Tuesday before heading back to his fortress in Calgary.
His day begins with a stop in North Vancouver in the Burnaby-North-Seymour riding, then it’s off to Pitt Meadows, just east of Vancouver, where he will highlight the Conservative Party’s plans to ease the tax burden for seniors.
Harper is expected at a large rally in Calgary before taking Wednesday off to prepare for Thursday’s debate on the economy.
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair will be in Lethbridge, Alta., on Tuesday for a morning health-care announcement at a community centre that aims to improve the quality of life for people in the aboriginal community.
The riding of Lethbridge has been long held by the Conservatives and before that the Canadian Alliance and Reform parties, but the NDP significantly increased its vote share in the 2011 election. The party collected about half the votes of the winner, but the NDP has often targeted Conservative ridings during this campaign that it hopes to scoop up.
Mulcair then moves on to Calgary, where he will visit a campaign office in the new riding of Calgary Confederation. It was created from parts of three other ridings, all of which were won by the Conservatives in the previous election by wide margins.
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But Mulcair will not hold a rally in Calgary in the evening, instead focusing on preparation for Thursday’s leaders’ debate on the economy hosted by the Globe and Mail.
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Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau hits the campaign trail early, heading to a plumbers’ union to make an 8 a.m. ET announcement about jobs and skilled trades.
Trudeau’s event is in the new southwestern Ontario riding of Waterloo, where the Liberals are hoping to make inroads.
The Waterloo riding largely is made up of the former Kitchener-Waterloo riding, which was once a Liberal stronghold but turned Conservative by a hair – 21,830 to 21,813 votes – in 2008. The Conservatives then retained it in 2011, holding off the former Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi.
Now his former executive assistant, Bardish Chagger, is taking up the Liberal banner in the riding.
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Green party Leader Elizabeth May heads to Guelph, Ont., where one of her star candidates is running. Gord Miller is the former environmental commissioner of Ontario.
The Greens have a solid base of support in Guelph, where they came in third in 2008 with 21 per cent of the vote, though that fell to a distant fourth in 2011. Provincially the leader of the party’s Ontario wing came in a close third in the riding last year.
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe has three events scheduled for Sherbrooke, Que., starting with a visit to a book store where he’ll discusses the federal sales tax on books.
Duceppe then gives a speech at Universite Sherbrooke, and attends a fundraiser Tuesday evening.
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