Canada's Martin admits election trouble looming- Reuters

Reuters http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=uri:2006-01-19T222211Z_01_N19193346_RTRUKOC_0_US-POLITICS-CANADA.xml&pageNumber=1&summit=

Canada's Martin admits election trouble looming
Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:22 PM ET

By David Ljunggren
OSHAWA, Ontario (Reuters) - Prime Minister Paul Martin insisted on Thursday that his Liberals were poised for a comeback in Canada's election race, admitting for the first time that the party had not worked hard enough so far.
A series of polls show the opposition Conservatives of Stephen Harper are poised to win the election and end 12 years of Liberal rule.
Although Martin's campaign has been dogged by scandals and gaffes, he says he is ignoring the polls and insists his party will win because Canadians back his values. But on Thursday he broke new ground by saying Liberals needed to do more.
"We are on the march and we are marching toward a remarkable comeback," Martin told a rally in Oshawa, an auto industry city just east of Toronto.
"We have the numbers, we can stop Stephen Harper. It is up to us. And I'm asking you to dig a little deeper, to go a little further, to fight a little harder," he said.
Martin's minority government was brought down in late November over a kickbacks scandal and has slipped steadily behind the Conservatives. The populous central province of Ontario, traditionally a Liberal stronghold, is now tilting more toward Harper especially outside Toronto.
A Strategic Counsel poll for Thursday's Globe and Mail newspaper had the Conservatives ahead 41 percent to 25 percent nationally, although other surveys say the gap is smaller.
An SES Research daily tracking poll for the CPAC television network on Thursday put support for the Conservatives at 37 percent to 31 percent for the Liberals -- a gap one point greater than on Wednesday.
Martin is trying to persuade voters that Harper is an extremist who would clamp down on personal freedoms such as gay marriage and abortion.
Harper, who has said he would oppose attempts to restrict abortion, told Global television on Wednesday he did not believe the issue should be addressed "in the near future".
Martin seized on this comment and also criticized Harper for complaining about the social activism of some judges.
"We've never seen a major political party with such a conservative agenda as this one, an agenda which has really been taken from the extreme right in the United States," he later told reporters in Toronto.
Conservative handlers at a 600-strong rally in Kitchener, Ontario, whisked an evangelical candidate away from reporters afterward in an attempt to keep him from making controversial remarks. He had written a letter to the editor in 2003 saying gay marriage could wipe out a society in a generation.
But Martin has been by hit the inability of some of his own legislators and allies to stay on message.
Minutes after he spoke in Oshawa, local Liberal candidate Judi Longfield told reporters she would vote against gay marriage if Parliament decided to reconsider the matter.
She also said she disagreed with Martin's promise to alter the Constitution to make it impossible for Parliament to overturn decisions by the Supreme Court on freedoms such as gay marriage and abortion.
Martin was forced on Wednesday to disown comments by the head of the Canadian Auto Workers' union, a Martin backer, who suggested people in the French-speaking province of Quebec should vote for the separatist Bloc Quebecois rather than for the Conservatives.
Harper seized on the comments as a sign the Liberals must be defeated.
"I don't care how much the Liberal Party wants to stay in power, it is absolutely unacceptable to in any way, shape or form suggest that people vote for the breakup of this country," he told reporters in Waterdown, Ontario, where his party lost narrowly to the Liberals in the June 2004 election.