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This article presents predictions for upcoming elections. British reporters covering Tony Blair's campaign in 2001 amused themselves by playing" battle-bus bingo": they wrote down Blair's favourite cliché phrases on strips of paper, paid a pound each to get into the contest, then each drew three strips of paper at random. Paul Martin rewarded this apple-cheeked British Columbia Liberal's bootlicking fealty with an appointment as the party's nominee in Burnaby-Douglas. Last week Peter Mansbridge's column announced that political leaders' tours are a waste of time, which is why the CBC will have its own bus travelling the country avoiding politicians. If Peter leads The National with more stories from the CBC bus than he does from Paul Martin's, Stephen Harper's and Jack Layton's, I'll buy him dinner.

This is an article that focuses on the last minute campaign efforts of Canadian politicians prior to elections in 2004. Media polling stops in a campaign's last days. As the campaign entered its final weekend, Stephen Harper picked up the phone and made some calls. Paul Martin's Liberal campaign, almost devoid of any project the average Canadian voter could identify, was based on warning that Conservatives couldn't be trusted. Hours after Martin released his platform in his hometown of Windsor, Ont., near the end of the campaign's second week, he appeared again in front of reporters in Montreal to warn that Harper couldn't be trusted to protect a woman's right to choose on abortion. At mid-campaign, a nasty bit of gossip had begun circling among Chretien people in Ottawa: Martin's fate would depend on the campaign's outcome.

This article focuses on politician Stephen Harper and his efforts to change his image. Roch Carrier's classic hockey sweater story may have the sentimental edge, but Stephen Harper's new version is more politically illuminating. It's the tale of a politician whose staff, always on the lookout for a chance to loosen up their boss's somewhat stiff image, try to get him to wear the Calgary Flames colours into the House of Commons--under his suit jacket, of course. That's just what he did last week, scoring precisely the desired TV clips and news photos. Naturally, the real Harper is neither the folksy guy in the Flames sweater nor the menacing character in a Liberal attack ad. Reynolds says Harper's master stroke on the file came last year, when as Alliance leader he smothered his party's reflex to criticize, and threw its support behind a five-year health accord struck between Jean Chrétien and the premiers.

This is an article that discusses politics in Canada. The first shudder of snap-election fever had barely rippled through Ottawa before tacticians in all parties started whispering it wasn't, couldn't be -- come on now, let's be serious -- the real thing. The fall of a minority, they reasoned, is supposed to be based on a solid calculation. But recent polls haven't been uplifting for either Liberals or Conservatives. And the issue that first set off election speculation -- a Kyoto policy provision in the government's omnibus budget legislation -- doesn't exactly lend itself to stump speeches and campaign ads. Stephen Harper threatens to force an election over the Kyoto measure, which seems highly unlikely since he has left no doubt recently that Conservatives want the next campaign to be fought over the sponsorship affair and Liberal ethics. Yet new developments that could make a spring campaign a real possibility are emerging at Justice John Gomery's sponsorship inquiry. Testimony given last week at the hearings in Montreal was considered explosive enough that some observers predicted the Tories and Bloc Québécois would consider defeating the government, and try to make Liberal corruption the ballot question. Liberals are betting any fresh details on Chrétien-era malfeasance won't stick to Martin. They want to negotiate around the Kyoto fuss, take the summer to regroup, and pray the fizz starts to go out of the sponsorship story. INSET: TWEAKING THE LANGUAGE LAWS.

The article reports that although polls at the outset of the campaign pointed to another Liberal minority, hindsight brings into focus scattered early harbingers of how the campaign turned out. Ontario voters had grown far less suspicious of the Tories. Pollster Darrell Bricker of Ipsos-Reid emphasized early on that Liberal support was "built on sand," stressing that more than 40 per cent of voters said they would be comfortable with a Tory minority.

I'm going to take the long way around to saying some nice things about Jack Layton, but let's begin by observing an oddity: nobody ever seemed to get angry when I criticized Paul Martin. For a few hours on a recent Monday night, it was possible to believe Stephen Harper might finally be figuring out how to play this game. He showed up at the biggest Canadian Alliance fundraiser Toronto has seen since the height of Stockmania in 2000. For 20 minutes he delivered the rationale for an Alliance government in terms that would surely have appealed to more than the 12 or 15 per cent of Canadians who say, in recent polls, that they'd vote for Harper's party. Despite hard work and Layton's formidable skills in French, two more by-elections on June 16 showed the New Democratic Party (NDP) to be in a closer fight with the Marijuana party in Quebec than with the Liberals. Alone among the leaders facing Paul Martin, Layton has already turned his mind to serious preparations for next year's election. As a former president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Layton will go head-to-head with Martin on urban issues.