Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff declared Sunday that the election campaign has just begun, and looking at his party's sluggish polls and a surging NDP, he better hope he's right.
"I just think that in lots of ways, the election has just begun," he said in Toronto. "I think we have got a week in which we choose a government ... and so, I feel as we get down to final, to the May 2, this is what it's going to come down to: who do you trust to govern the country?"
Unfortunately for Ignatieff, polls suggest that Canadians are increasingly saying that NDP Leader Jack Layton might be the person they trust to lead the government.
With the Liberals unable to gain any momentum in the polls, the party took out a new 30-minute infomercial inviting Canadians to get "up close and personal" with Ignatieff.
The ad features a personal address from Ignatieff, similar in tone to the town hall meetings he has been holding daily during the election campaign.
The Liberals say the town halls, in which Ignatieff takes unscripted questions from the audience, are in contrast to the tightly-controlled Conservative campaign, in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper only accepts five questions a day from reporters.
"This isn't style, this is trying to do politics differently," Ignatieff told reporters at a news conference Sunday. "I go out there and I stand up on a rainy Thursday night at a legion hall and take questions from the public. Mr. Harper hasn't taken an unscripted question from the public in five years.
"We are trying to say we can do politics differently."
In the ad, Ignatieff accuses Harper of politicizing everything.
"I think we want a government that listens to Canadians instead of manipulates Canadians," Ignatieff says in the ad.
"We got a prime minister who is all politics all the time -- everything's political. There doesn't seem to be any principle that he won't sacrifice. There isn't any national interest that matters more than the Conservative party.
"So, he's got a very clear vision of the Conservative party and no vision at all of the country."
Ignatieff said with a week left until voting day, he wants to keep a positive campaign, focused on the Liberal platform.
Layton, Ignatieff cross paths
In Ontario, Layton and Ignatieff both addressed the crowd at the annual Khalsa Day parade, an event that typically draws tens of thousands of Sikhs celebrating the birth of their religion.
The pair had a brief handshake, CTV's Richard Madan reported on Twitter.
Each had a short speech, only minutes apart.
Ignatieff and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney were both greeted by polite applause when they spoke on the ground of Queen's Park in downtown Toronto.
Layton got, by far, the biggest cheers from the crowd. When he took the stage in an orange bandana, there was a chant of "NDP! NDP!"
The Toronto event was the first time this campaign that two leaders appeared at the same event at the same time -- other than the French- and English-language leaders' debates that were broadcast on television.
With only eight days to go before the election, the Liberals and New Democrats find themselves neck and neck with one another in several polls, and the parties' respective leaders are trying to win as many votes as they can from Canadians who do not want to support the Conservatives.
Liberal Senator David Smith said the party is hoping that voters will be drawn to its centre-leaning policies and its past record of governance.
"We've never represented the far-left, we've never represented the far-right. We're the party of the middle," Smith told CTV's Question Period.
NDP campaign director Brad Lavigne said that the New Democrats give Canadians an additional choice, beyond the traditional parties that have held power in Ottawa.
Harper revisits arts credit
Harper began his day in Victoria, announcing the Conservative Party's intention to move forward with a children's arts tax credit if given the chance to govern in the next Parliament.
The Conservatives previously announced the $500 tax credit in the budget they introduced earlier this year. But they did not have a chance to implement it before the election was called.
Harper was asked if he thought Canadians were prepared to trust him with a majority government.
"We always say in all these elections in a democratic ethos, voters are never supposed to give absolute trust to anybody," he answered.
However, he then added: "The choice is obvious, to trust the government that is leading Canada on the right track."
CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife said Harper's late-campaign appearance in B.C. appears to signal concern that the Conservative-held seats in the region may be more vulnerable than the party would like.
He said that in order to clinch a majority government, the Conservatives have to hang onto what they have, an outcome that could be put in jeopardy by rising NDP support in the western province.
"Mr. Harper's gameplan from the beginning of this election campaign is to get a majority and to pick off opposition-held ridings," Fife told CTV's Question Period on Sunday morning.
"If he's going to lose Conservative ridings, he's got to make them up somewhere else."
Harper is also due to make an appearance in Vancouver later in the day.
NDP ads have put Tories ‘off their playbook'
Polls have suggested that support for the NDP has increased during the course of the campaign in several regions across Canada, which has prompted rival parties to focus some of their criticism on the New Democrats and their policies.
The Liberals say the NDP platform contains costly promises that will not be good for the economy. Meanwhile, Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe is asking for separatists to support his party, amid heightened competition from the NDP for votes in Quebec.
But the Conservatives have also launched attack ads focused on Layton's role in the short-lived Liberal-NDP coalition of 2008.
NDP candidate Paul Dewar said Sunday that the attack ads are an indication that the increase in New Democrat support has caught the Conservatives by surprise.
"Their playbook is all about going after whoever is in front of them. And right now I guess there's a bit of a change in their playbook," Dewar told CTV's Question Period.
But Conservative candidate John Baird said the Tories had previously released ads targeting Layton and the coalition.
Baird told CTV's Question Period that Canadians will either choose to elect a majority Conservative government or a "risky, shaky coalition" that involves opposition parties.
With files from The Canadian Press
