Canada opposition NDP blasts rival in bid to regain lost ground

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, trailing in the race to replace the Conservatives in Oct. 19 elections, tried on Friday to regain lost ground in its main stronghold by attacking his chief rival.

Opinion polls show the New Democrats of Thomas Mulcair - which started the campaign strongly - could come in third nationally and shed one-third of its seats in the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.

One potential beneficiary of the slide is the rival centre-left Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau, who says he is the best choice to defeat Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Mulcair said Trudeau backed Harper on key issues such as the need for oil pipelines and a controversial new security law that gives police broad powers.

"You have the same economic, social and environmental policies. We're against Mr. Harper, we want to beat him and replace him," he told Trudeau in a televised French-language debate.

Mulcair has stumbled in Quebec over the question of whether Muslim women should be allowed to fully cover their faces with veils during citizenship ceremonies. The Conservatives are trying to ban the practice.

Mulcair says women do not need to lift the veil as long as they show their faces before the ceremony for identification purposes - a stance that polls indicate is hugely unpopular in the province.

He told a rally of New Democrats on Thursday that the most important question of the campaign should be whether Canada really wanted Harper to stay in power.

The tough-on-crime low-tax Conservatives are bidding to win a rare fourth consecutive election.

Mulcair noted that after winning his first majority in 2011, Harper had raised the retirement age to 67 from 65.

"Did you tell that to Quebecers and Canadians during the last election (campaign)? What are you hiding this time, Mr. Harper?" he said.

Harper, who like Mulcair is promising balanced budgets, says both rival parties plan to ramp up spending so much that they will need to rely on tax hikes and big budget deficits.

"It is important in an unstable world economy to preserve our tax cuts," he said.

The New Democrats have never governed federally and became the largest opposition party for the first time in 2011 after winning a majority of seats in Quebec, Canada's second most populous province.

A Leger poll in the Journal de Montreal on Friday showed the party was now doing so poorly that it would take only 37 of the 78 Quebec seats in the House of Commons, down from the 54 it currently has.

Nationally, surveys suggest the Conservatives will capture the most seats but fall short of a majority. On paper, that would leave them vulnerable to being defeated by the Liberals and New Democrats acting together.

(Reporting by Randall Palmer; Editing by James Dalgleish and Ken Wills)

WhatsAppFacebookTwitterLinkedinBeloudBluesky