OTTAWA - Imagine all the people, voting NDP.
Jack Layton is no John Lennon, but the piano-playing, left-leaning NDP leader is nonetheless urging Canadian voters to explore the boundaries of their political imaginations.
The party's latest ad, titled "Imagine," urges viewers to think seriously about making a prime minister of Layton -- a man whose party has never had the heft to genuinely challenge the Liberals or the Conservatives.
It's a dramatic departure from the usual fare of animated cut-outs and low-budget Tory bashing, another clear sign that with opinion polls suggesting a surge in popularity in Quebec and elsewhere, the NDP is in unfamiliar territory.
No one, it seems, knows that better than their leader.
"I'm a New Democrat," a pragmatic-sounding Layton said Tuesday during a campaign event in Montreal, when confronted with the reality that more votes may not mean more seats.
"We're used to working very, very hard, and having people come and be interested in our ideas, but then because of our current electoral system we don't get the number of seats that are warranted by the percentage of vote that we get."
A new Ekos poll released Tuesday had the NDP at 28 per cent, just six points back of the Conservatives at 34 per cent. The Liberals were at 24 per cent.
The Green party was at 6.8 per cent, another victim of the NDP surge, while the Bloc Quebecois stood firm at six per cent.
The poll was conducted Saturday through Monday and randomly surveyed 2,532 Canadians. It carries a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Layton is in unfamiliar waters on policy issues as well as polls, tackling issues the NDP hasn't historically talked much about -- such as bringing Quebec into the Constitution.
He's appropriated Lucien Bouchard's "winning conditions" -- a term the former Quebec premier once used to describe the road to another sovereignty referendum -- for his own use, presumably to soothe separatist-minded Quebecers.
"We have this historic problem that we have a quarter of the population, the people of Quebec, who have never signed on to the Constitution," he said.
"It remains a significant gap in our political history and our political context, and has to be addressed someday."
Just when "someday" is, Layton won't say. He's got more pressing concerns.
"The issues of immediate concern to people are getting a job, the fact they don't have family doctors, the retirement security of seniors," he said. "Those are the immediate issues."
On the other side of the country -- and the other end of the momentum meter -- was Michael Ignatieff, pitching the Liberals as the only true guardian of gun control in Canada, and the only sensible choice for an anti-Harper voter.
"If you vote for Mr. Layton, your're going to get a Harper minority government. If you vote for Mr. Duceppe, you're going to get a Harper minority government," Ignatieff said.
"The only party that can actually replace the Harper government with a passionate, progressive, responsible alternative is the Liberal party of Canada."
Voting NDP would be a costly mistake, he said -- particularly on issues like Afghanistan, where Layton's party has long insisted Canadian troops should be pulled out post-haste.
"Come on, folks, let's be serious," Ignatieff said.
"We've got to choose a government on the 2nd of May; we can't choose a bunch of boy scouts on this issue."
The only thing that could silence the long-winded Liberal leader, who staged his event outside a Vancouver police station, was an emergency siren -- a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for the crisis gripping the Grits.
"God bless 'em, they're out there helping the people," Ignatieff said as the sirens faded.
"That's more important than what we're talking about."
The Liberals opened a front Tuesday in Quebec as well, releasing a series of French-only television ads in which Ignatieff talks about the province's place in Canada, the "knowledge economy" and his "vision of Canadian democracy."
The party says the ads were filmed without scripts, an attempt to capitalize on Ignatieff's impressive off-the-cuff performances in town-hall style campaign events.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, hoping to capitalize on flagging Bloc Quebecois fortunes, took his riding-by-riding battle to Asbestos, Que., and the riding of Richmond-Arthabaska, a Bloc seat the Conservatives see as vulnerable.
With only 12 seats separating the Tories from majority territory, Harper's strategy has been to target specific ridings where they have a fighting chance by talking about specific issues and initiatives of pressing concern to local voters.
In Asbestos, that's asbestos. But the Conservatives know it by another name.
"The only party that defends the chrysotile industry is our party, the Conservative party," Harper said.
Chrysotile is the name used by the government-funded industry lobby group, the Chrysotile Institute, that promotes white asbestos and attempts to soften laws restricting or banning its use.
Harper's support for the local asbestos mining industry has come under fierce criticism at home and abroad, as the product is highly restricted in Canada.
"Canada is one of a number of exporters of chrysotile and there are many countries in which it is legal who are buyers," Harper said.
"This government will not put Canadian industry in a position where it is discriminated against in a market where sale is permitted."
The asbestos mine in Thetford Mines currently employs 225 seasonal workers, and the aim is to double the workforce and make it permanent.
With the luxury of momentum, Layton is taking his campaign to the so-called "high road," hoping to appear prime ministerial and above the fray as election day nears.
And as he finds himself in the sights of his Liberal and Conservative rivals, Layton is at pains not to take the bait.
"I'm not running for prime minister in order to attack other party leaders," he said when asked about a recent barrage of Liberal attack ads targeting the NDP.
"I am running -- and I've been in political life a long time -- to attack the issues and the problems that people are facing."
