CANADA: Conservative leader Stephen Harper is finding that friendliness to the US can be dangerous, writes Denis Staunton in Oshawa, Ontario
Stephen Harper moved slowly through the crowd, greeting well-wishers with a quick handshake and a diffident, watery smile that looked almost painful. The Conservative leader was in Oshawa, an industrial town 50km (31 miles) east of Toronto, addressing the blue- clad, balloon-waving faithful in a half-full hotel ballroom.
On the podium, dressed casually in a light tweed sports coat over a black polo-neck sweater, Mr Harper punched out his party's slogans, promising to stand up for Canada.
"We'll clean up government. We'll get on with moving this country forward," he said.
If Mr Harper (46) looked uncomfortable, it may have been because opinion polls had just put his party ahead of the governing Liberals for the first time in Canada's election campaign.
The economist knows from bitter experience that the position of front-runner in a Canadian election race is a perilous one.
In 2004, he looked certain to lead the Conservatives to victory - until a last-minute surge of support moved to the Liberals, who had portrayed Mr Harper as a dangerous right-wing ideologue.
The Conservative leader is indeed ideological, a neo-liberal intellectual with links to a group of neo-conservative academics known as the Calgary School.
However he has modernised his party since becoming leader in 2002, abandoning a promise to change Canada's abortion laws and playing down the party's opposition to gay marriage.
Traditionally the party of white, rural Canada, today's Conservatives are seeking support among immigrants and are even hoping to pick up seats in Quebec, where they have none.
If Mr Harper is to become Canada's next prime minister on January 23rd, the Conservatives must win in places like Oshawa, the centre of Canada's dwindling automobile industry. Last November, General Motors announced that one of its plants in Oshawa would close in 2008, a decision affecting 2,750 jobs.
The Oshawa plant closure is part of a plan to restructure General Motors' entire North American operation, underscoring the reality that, since the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) in 1994, Canada's industrial destiny has been tied more intimately than ever to that of the United States.
Industrially, Ontario is fully integrated into the Great Lakes region of the US, as Canadians discovered two years ago when power cuts spread northwards from Ohio, plunging Toronto into darkness.
Almost everything Ontario produces is now exported to the US and internal Canadian trade has diminished, a trend pushing Canada's provinces further away from one another.
Mr Harper wants to transfer some federal powers to provincial governments, a proposal that could help a minority Conservative government to win the support of the separatist Bloc Québecois.
Jack Layton, leader of the left- wing New Democratic Party, this week accused Mr Harper of tearing Canada apart for the sake of separatist support.
"The Conservatives want to dismantle the Canadian state - so does the Bloc," Mr Layton said.
In Oshawa, the Conservative leader avoided the federal issue, focusing instead on the themes he knew would please the crowd - cutting the federal sales tax, cracking down on crime and rooting out corruption.
The biggest cheers came when he promised that his government's first action would be to introduce a government accountability act that would make the awarding of public contracts more transparent and protect whistleblowers.
He rehearsed the details of Liberal scandals, including the Can$100 million sponsorship scam in Quebec and a police investigation into alleged insider trading linked to the finance minister's office.
"I will do whatever is necessary to eliminate the kind of scandals and corruption we have had with this government," he said.
Crime remains low in Canada, with murders at just 12 per cent of the US rate, but it has become a big campaign issue following a fatal shoot-out between gangs in Toronto just after Christmas.
"Citizens watched in horror as the heart of Toronto was the scene of a gunfight in broad daylight," he said. "This is not the Toronto area I grew up in. We would not have tolerated such violence then and Torontonians should not have to tolerate it today."
Towards the end of Mr Harper's speech, when he promised to build up Canada's defence forces, a heckler asked if he wanted to send Canadian soldiers to Iraq. Mr Harper ignored the question and the heckler was shown out.
But he had touched on what could yet become Mr Harper's greatest vulnerability in the final weeks of the campaign: fears that a Conservative government would bring Canada's foreign policy closer to Washington's.
George W Bush's administration is almost universally loathed in Canada, as US ambassador David Wilkins discovered last month when he chided Liberal prime minister Paul Martin for bashing Washington over global warming.
"It may be smart election politics to thump your chest and constantly criticise your friend and number one trading partner, but it is a slippery slope," the ambassador said.
He had a point - Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than America's - but the ambassador's remarks played straight into Mr Martin's hands.
"I am not going to be dictated to," the prime minister huffed.
Mr Harper, terrified of appearing too pro-American, immediately denounced the ambassador's intervention as "inappropriate" and asked him to keep out of Canada's election campaign. "I don't think foreign ambassadors should be expressing their views or intervening in an election," he said.