I've just driven from Ottawa to Montreal. I finish this campaign at Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's election night headquarters in a hotel in his riding of St. Laurent-Cartierville, near Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.
On election night I and my colleague Hannah Thibedeau will be reporting from here during Global Television's network special (Do be sure to tune in!).
The hotel the Liberals have booked is the Four Points Sheraton and, like the Liberal Party, it has seen better days. Like the Liberals, the hotel owners have been frantically undergoing renovations to get ready for Tuesday. Like the Liberals, the hotel has got a lot of new stuff but there are still parts that are under construction or need updating.
I've been on the phone with Liberal incumbents over the last couple of days. They are cautiously optimistic and they sense that the momentum has been on their side over the last week of the campaign. But still, they worry the new momentum may not be enough to put them over the top.
Pollster Nik Nanos just released his final poll for the campaign. Nanos, political junkies will recall, got the popular vote pretty much spot on in 2006. If he's right again, you're looking at slightly weakened Tory minority — again. Here's his final numbers:
Conservatives: 34.2 per cent
Liberals: 26.7
NDP: 21.4
BQ: 9.5
Greens: 8.2
(Nanos' says his poll of 1,400 Canadians take over the last three nights is accurate to within 2.6 percentage points 19 times out of 20)
Some observations on the numbers:
• If the Conservatives do, in fact, come in at 34.2 on Tuesday, they will have done worse than 2006 when they scored 36 per cent of the popular vote.
• If the Liberals score 26.7 per cent, that would be a disaster. Their 2006 popular support was 30 per cent and that was historically low. When John Turner was getting wiped out by Brian Mulroney in 1984, the Liberals still scored 28 per cent. As I blogged earlier, anything below 28 per cent gives Dion the lowest popular vote in Liberal history except for the very first election the new Dominion of Canada had in 1867 when Liberal leader George Brown notched just 22.67 per cent of popular vote against the very popular John A. Macdonald. Dion says he won't quit as a result of Tuesday's vote but if the popular vote is not at least where it was in 2006, he can expect there will be those in his party who will point at the popular vote and tell him it's time to go.
• If the NDP numbers hold, they should be very happy. They notched about 17 per cent in 2006 and Jack Layton, with a strong campaign, will have improved on that. His seat totals, though, will very much depend on how the vote splits in some key ridings in Ontario and in British Columbia.
• The Bloc scored 11 per cent of the “national” vote, good enough for 48 seats. They may lose the odd seat but they pick up the odd seat to stay pretty much where they are, give or take a couple.
• The Greens got five per cent last time and will do better this time but it's probably not enough for a seat in the House. (If they get one, my money is on Vancouver Centre where Green deputy leader Adriane Carr is up against Liberal incumbent Hedy Fry.) Still, by my calculation, every one per cent of the popular vote nationally, translates into an extra $275,000 a year in terms of public subsidy and that will give them some more resources to build on.