Will Stéphane Dion defile the odds?
Must-reads: Lawrence Martin on the Canadian election; Rosie DiManno and Margaret Wente on Sarah Palin; Christie Blatchford on getting our act together in Afghanistan. Main Street Canadians like the status quo How Stéphane Dion can become Prime Minister, and the 10,000 reasons he probably won’t. We know what Jack Layton, Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe are going to do on the campaign trail, an unusually energetic Lawrence Martin opines in The Globe and Mail. The election’s result is all up to the unknown quantity: Dion. If he “appreciably exceeds his remarkably low expectations,” taking “dead aim at the Harper government” on Afghanistan, fiscal management and the environment, then he might just “eke out a two-seat minority.” But “if, as most expect, he trips over his own tongue and toes, it will be John Turner revisited.” The smart money’s on Harper, of course, but Dion has proven himself again and again as a “defiler of the odds”—that’s either a typo or a brilliant turn of phrase, we
