Canada's Conservatives confident despite NDP surge

SAULT STE MARIE, Ontario (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed confidence on Monday his Conservatives will win next week's election despite a surprise late surge by the left-leaning New Democratic Party.

Harper brought his campaign tour to Sault Ste Marie, an industrial city in northern Ontario, where the Conservatives hope to snag a seat from the New Democrats in their bid to win a majority government.

"I'm confident we are going to win this election," Harper said, noting that his government would be ready to "hit the ground running" the day after the May 2 vote.

Polls show the Conservatives with a solid lead, but a jump in support for the New Democratic Party (NDP) has political observers scrambling to figure out if it helps or hinders the Conservatives' push to get a majority government after being elected with minority governments in 2006 and 2008.

The NDP has traditionally lagged the Conservatives and Liberals, but with strong performances in televised debates by leader Jack Layton, polls now show the NDP in a statistical tie with the Liberals for second place.

While the NDP's rise could help the Conservatives by taking votes from the other opposition parties, it could also hurt them by cutting into their preelection plan of winning some weak NDP seats to get a majority.

Harper continued to cast the election as a choice between the Conservatives getting a majority that would allow them to carry out their program, or remaining a weak minority government vulnerable to being replaced in Parliament by the Liberals, supported by other opposition parties.

Sault Ste Marie, which is just over the border from Michigan, is a community where the New Democrats barely beat the Conservatives in the 2008 election, although the NDP had not previously represented the area in Parliament since the 1980s.

Harper did not mention Layton on Monday and made only indirect jabs at the New Democrats.

The Liberals, faced with being swamped by an NDP surge, were much more direct, running new ads attacking the NDP's budget plans.

But Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, also campaigning in New Democratic-held territory in northern Ontario, denied he was now caught in a political squeeze. "I feel that I've got running room either way," Ignatieff told reporters in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Layton, campaigning in Atlantic Canada, scoffed at the idea that his party was taking votes from the Liberals and would thus ensure a Conservative majority.

"This is the absurd proposal that somehow you don't really have a choice but to vote for one or other of the two old-line parties," Layton told reporters in Saint John, New Brunswick.

(Additional reporting by Randall Palmer, editing by Peter Galloway)