Canada set for general election as economy softens

OTTAWA(Reuters) – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen

Harper is preparing to call an election Sunday that looks

set to be dominated by the softening economy and a carbon tax

plan proposed by his chief opponent.

Harper's Conservatives, who won power in January 2006,

control a minority of seats in Parliament. Polls indicate a

vote now would result in another Conservative minority.

The election — most likely to be held on Oct 14. — will

mark Canada's third in four years and comes at a time when the

economy is struggling to cope with the U.S. slowdown.

Under a fixed election date law brought in by Harper, the

next national vote was set for October 2009. Although Harper

says he wants a poll now on the grounds that Parliament has

stopped working, others suspect different motives.

"Stephen Harper wants to rush into an election before

Canadians can realize how little he has done to prepare our

country to deal with the slowdown of the economy," said

Stephane Dion, leader of the opposizy time for the country to take risks,"

said Harper, accusing Dion of thinking out the plan so badly

"that he's still changing it on the back of envelopes".

The Conservatives regularly mock Dion, a former academic

from French-speaking Canada who sometimes has trouble making

himself understood in English.

"To get the message across you have to have someone that

people are willing to listen to and this is the big question —

will the Liberals have that person?" said Pierre Martin, a

political scientist at the University of Montreal.

Dion, an outsider, surprisingly won a Liberal leadership

race in late 2006 and has little support among legislators.

Indeed, many Conservatives and Liberals agree that Dion is

a major liability for his party. To make matters worse for

Dion, the Liberals are having trouble raising money and he is

personally unpopular in his home province of Quebec.

Yet despite their many advantages, the Conservatives have

rarely managed to record more than 36 percent of public

support, short of the 40 percent needed for a majority under

Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system.

"I haven't seen anything to suggest that there would be a

significant change in the current political environment," said

pollster Nik Nanos of Nanos Research, the only pollster to

correctly predict the result of the last election.

Part of the reason is continuing voter uncertainty about

Harper, an aloof and rather wooden figure who opponents say is

harboring an extremist agenda.

"We need to win against the most right-wing prime minister

in the history of our country … Stephen Harper wants to give

George W. Bush a third term in Ottawa," Dion said this week.

The Conservatives, who point to their record as evidence

this charge is nonsense, are very strong in rural areas and

western Canada. Yet they have made no headway at all in the

three main cities — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Only one prime minister — Liberal Lester B. Pearson in the

1960s — has won two successive minority governments.