SASKATOON -- Tom Mulcair is no longer shy in his pitch to Canadian voters and urged them late Monday to elect a "good, solid majority NDP government" on Oct. 19.
The plea -- at this point in the campaign -- seems both gravity and perhaps poll-defying in the face of a series of recent surveys suggesting New Democrats are headed in the other direction and perhaps on the road to third-party status.
All three federal leaders have been cautious in their appeals to voters throughout the long campaign, especially when surveys last month showed the governing Conservatives, Liberals and NDP deadlocked in a three-way tie.
Even up to Monday morning, Mulcair was pleading with voters to just give him "35 more seats to defeat Stephen Harper," although he conceded he'd be happy with anything above that. He's been fond of reminding his audiences that the Liberals need to elect 100 new MPs in order to get the job done.
It was a humble, tentative ask that party officials insisted has tested well on the doorsteps, but the pretence was cast aside late Monday as Mulcair addressed party supporters in a Saskatoon parking lot.
He reminded them of how Conservative attack ads chewed up and spit out previous Liberal opposition leaders -- something that didn't happen to him. And he went further, suggesting the NDP's performance as Official Opposition means it deserves a shot governing.
"Remember Stephane Dion? Remember Michael Ignatieff? So much road kill before Mr. Harper's machine," he said. "We stood up to Stephen Harper on all of these issues every step of the way. We have earned Canadians' confidence. We have earned their trust."
It is a much sharper pitch and comes as there is a growing sense of frustration among party strategists that their message -- the NDP is the shortest path to defeating the Conservatives -- is not getting through, particularly with the national media.
Mulcair's stops on Thanksgiving in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan were designed to push local candidates over the line in hotly contested ridings where the NDP insist their only competition is the Conservative party.
The NDP sees B.C. as a particularly important battleground.
"Only the NDP can beat the Conservatives here in British Columbia," Mulcair said.
New Democrats are expecting tight three-way fights in Vancouver.
But they believe they can pick up three seats on Vancouver Island and are confident of adding two others on the mainland, including the newly created riding of Pitt Meadows Maple Ridge, a scenic, largely blue collar community east of high-priced Vancouver.
In fact, part of the NDP strategy seems to hinge on making gains in areas where the economy is under strain or has been hammered by globalized trade.
Mulcair pointed out his campaign swung last week through a vast swath of southwestern Ontario, once the manufacturing heartland of the country.
"Six towns in six Conservative ridings," he said. "You knew, and I knew in those ridings the NDP was going to be winning, and everything that's been published since then is proving that. So, when we went from Brantford to Waterloo to Stratford to London to Sarnia to Essex, we knew that the only party that was going to be defeating the Conservatives in those blue ridings was the NDP."
It's not the first time the party has made the same bet. The NDP concentrated on those same economic hard-luck regions in previous campaigns, only to come up short.
A different dynamic is at play in this campaign with the Conservatives signing the multi-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the NDP has seized upon as a potential life line for the campaign.
Throughout his campaign stops over the holiday weekend, Mulcair hammered the "secret" agreement, which he says Conservative Leader Stephen Harper tripped over himself to achieve before the election.
"Everybody saw him coming. He got played for a chump," Mulcair said.
The NDP repeated their demand Monday for the government to release the full text of the agreement so the public can decide for itself whether it's a good deal.
