Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, hit by scandals and locked in a near dead-heat ahead of Monday’s election, has put away his teleprompter and taken his campaign on the offensive.
A day ahead of a federal election that looked as though it could spell the end for the Trudeay, the PM's backers were seeing signs of hope.
Surveys of public opinion still indicate that Trudeau will lose his majority in Parliament and be forced to rely on the support of smaller parties.
But talk of an outright loss to Andrew Scheer's Conservatives has faded and a weekend of bad headlines for the Tories energized Liberal aides.
The Globe and Mail reported Scheer’s team had hired a company to "seek and destroy" the campaign of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), a new splinter movement that threatens to split the Conservative vote. The PPC is threatening legal action and accused the main opposition party of "dirty politics".
Two senior aides on Trudeau’s plane even said it might still be possible to win a majority of the 338 seats in the House of Commons, which is unlikely if opinion polls and the Liberals own forecasts are accurate.
The party’s current slim majority of seven is expected to be wiped out by losses in Quebec, Atlantic Canada and the West, according to the party’s internal projections, and the prospects for making up the difference are unclear.
