SASKATOON – Liberal candidate MP Morris Bodnar, seeking re-election, has one central message as he goes door-to-door in his Saskatoon-Blackstrap riding.
It also is the message he says he is hearing from voters.
“People are not asking me a question. They are telling me what to do,” he said in an interview after a day of campaigning in rural areas.
“The words I heard back, and which I offer, are ‘stay the course’. And of course, don’t forget about jobs and education and health care. But don’t blow it on the deficit.”
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It is a message prairie Liberal candidates say they are giving and receiving, from northern Manitoba to southern Alberta.
This is the central feature of the national Liberal campaign, a campaign notable for its caution.
Its themes are: the deficit is being tamed, interest rates are low and job growth soon will get better.
It has been a front-runner’s campaign, promoting the government record and denouncing opposition promises as extravagant.
Liberals have fumed as opposition politicians take for granted the Liberal deficit cutting, and try to score points promising how to use the surpluses, expected as early as 1999.
The Liberals have promised that once surpluses appear, half will be used to reduce the debt and the rest divided between program spending and tax cuts.
“Voters don’t want us to go backwards with tax cuts before the deficit is gone,” Liberal party leader Jean ChrŽtien said during the televised leaders’ debates.
It is widely expected this is ChrŽtien’s last campaign, after more than 30 years in federal politics.
His last-campaign strategy has been to stress accomplishments and the Liberal team, and to promise a steady hand on the steering wheel in the countdown to the millennium.
Rough ride
But the Liberal leader also has seemed shaky at times, not always a campaign asset.
In Manitoba, he agreed to an ill-timed photo opportunity at a flood dike the day before he called the election. It became the opposition symbol of insensitivity to Manitoba’s crisis.
In Saskatchewan, he passed up invitations to talk about agriculture issues and referred in jest to the agriculture portfolio as something a prime minister gives to his enemies – in the last government, Regina MP Ralph Goodale.
Yet the Liberal campaign has managed to stay on a steady course.
In Manitoba’s Dauphin-Swan River riding, Marlene Cowling runs for re-election by talking about government infrastructure investment and promises of stable health-care funding and pharmacare.
But she says the Liberal record of getting the nation’s finances in order also is a selling point.
“I just find the mood so much more positive this time than in 1993. People believe again.”
