As week one in the federal election campaign draws to a close the parties are giving the GTA a pass for the second straight day.

You can expect each of the leaders to take a day off on either Saturday or Sunday. But for the local campaigns the weekends are when volunteers have more time to give and canvassers have a better chance of finding voters at home.

Campaigns will be opening their local riding offices and they'll be out getting signs up and knocking on doors.

Who is ‘Here for Canada?'

We talk about attack TV ads but today we are seeing what I call an attack web site. The Conservative Party slogan is "Here For Canada" but it seems the party forgot to register the domain. Now someone has registered it and that someone is clearly a Liberal supporter. Check out this url http://hereforcanada.ca.

A click will take you to a page called "Fear for Canada". Now scroll down and click on "for hope click here". That click will take you straight to the Liberal Party's web site. One media savvy political operative helped me find the server for the site. It's listed as "lpchosting.com. Could "lpc" stand for Liberal Party of Canada?

Harper hits the East Coast

Stephen Harper is spending the day in the Maritimes. He continues to remind voters of all the things the Conservative budget would have brought Canadians if only the "coalition" had not forced an election.

His photo-ops are carefully chosen with backdrops to reinforce the theme of the "announcement." Harper is only taking a handful of questions a day from the national media and he continues to make time for local media.

Ignatieff targets families

Michael Ignatieff spent the week focusing on family issues. He made expensive promises on post secondary education, early child education and this morning he promised to find ways to support families dealing with emergency personal care needs at home. That program will cost a billion dollars. But a political strategy is emerging.

The Liberals released a series of ads this week. In one of them Ignatieff talks about his family's challenge in dealing with his mother's alzheimers. It is a simple ad, with Ignatieff, alone, on camera in front of a white backdrop, telling his family's story.

It is simpler than the more produced Conservative ads that have been running for some time now with Harper and his family. That Liberal ad also relates directly to today's announcement.

The Liberals know they need to find ways to counter the Conservative ads trying to define Ignatieff as an opportunist who came back to Canada because he wanted to be Prime Minister.

Layton pushes rural docs

Before the election call the NDP made better health care in rural Canada a key part of its platform. Jack Layton lobbied the Conservatives to make it part of the budget and when that budget failed to deliver enough money for rural health care Layton decided to oppose the budget.

Today in northern Ontario Layton repeated his party's commitment to getting more doctors and nurses closer to Canadians living outside the big cities.

Debates on the horizon

The Liberals will roll out their policy book on Sunday morning and then I expect they will spend the week promoting it. No word yet on what parts of the country the leader tours will hit but you can be sure they will start making time for the big event of the campaign the leaders' debate on April 12.

Here at CP24 we'll have our second debate of the election on April 6 at 9. Stephen LeDrew will be in the chair as we talk about GTA issues with Lisa Raitt, the Conservative Party candidate from Halton, Ruby Dhalla, the Liberal candidate from Brampton-Sprindale and the NDP candidate from Trinity-Spadina, Olivia Chow.