HEADLINE: Election in Canada Is Shorter, but Just as Brutal

BYLINE:  By JAMES BROOKE

DATELINE: TORONTO, Nov. 16

    Quickly and cheaply, Canada may choose a prime minister in less time
than it takes the United States to settle an election for president.

    With voting to take place Nov. 27, Canada telescopes the two-year
American campaign into 36 days. On the money side, it shrinks the $3
billion Americans spent on campaigns this season to about $50 million,
roughly what an American presidential candidate spends in two months.

       But while Canada's campaign may be short and cheap, it is not
sweet.

    Jean Chretien, who tried to take advantage of his high approval
ratings by calling a snap election in October after serving just three and a half
years of his five-year mandate, is seeking to become the first prime
minister since 1945 to win three consecutive majority governments. At the
start, he took the high road, announcing grandly that "those who throw mud
lose ground."

    But his polling advantage over his main challenger, Stockwell Day of
the conservative Canadian Alliance, has eroded, to around 20 percent in
several polls. In one set of polls, by Ipsos Reid, the prime minister's
advantage has narrowed calamitously, from 32 percentage points one month
ago to 12 points last week.

    In the last election, in 1997, Mr. Chretien won only 38.5 percent of
the popular vote, but his Liberal Party won a governing majority of 51.5
percent of seats in Parliament, as opposition votes split among four other
parties.

    Now, Mr. Chretien, a craggy 66-year-old Liberal who first entered
Parliament in 1963, finds himself in a fight for his political life with
Mr. Day, a 50-year-old fresh face from Alberta, a booming, low-tax
province where he was treasury minister.

    "Our guys are a bit on the knife edge, on the cusp of a majority or on
the cusp of a minority," Thomas S. Axworthy, a lifelong Liberal, said here
with the detachment that comes from a part-time job teaching public policy
at Harvard University.

    Seeking to scare Canadians away from the newcomer from the West, Mr.
Chretien paints his adversary as a red-neck extremist who is masquerading
as a moderate. Charging that Mr. Day, an evangelical Christian, would put
contentious social issues like abortion and the death penalty before
voters in national referendums, the prime minister has compared his
smooth-talking opponent to a dishonest car salesman, saying: "This guy has
two agendas. Would you buy a car from a guy who has two sets of books?"

    This month, Mr. Chretien attacked Mr. Day's desire to give more power
to Canada's 10 provinces, saying, "Stockwell Day's proposition is to
destroy Canada." In another speech he implied that the Alliance, a new
party with 250,000 members, is in ideological league with the "dark
forces" of European fascism.

    Mr. Day dismissed the attacks as "desperate responses of a desperate
man afraid of losing power."
    But with the election fast approaching, the Liberals seem to have
decided that raising fears about Mr. Day is the best way to galvanize
voters who might otherwise stay at home. On Tuesday, Elinor Caplan, the
immigration minister, who is in a tough re-election fight in a district
north of here, said of the Alliance, "Their supporters are Holocaust
deniers, prominent bigots and racists."

    The attacks, which Ms. Caplan endorsed in a television interview, came
after about 1,000 Jewish voters in her Thornhill district turned out for a
rally by Mr. Day and the local Alliance candidate, Robert Goldin.

    "Thousands and thousands and thousands of Jewish voters have come over
to the Canadian Alliance," Mr. Goldin, who is Jewish, told The Globe and
Mail today."She is just trying to recover the Jewish vote that she lost."

    In response, Mr. Day called for increased, but legal, immigration and
said one quarter of his 300 parliamentary candidates are "visible
minorities," a Canadian term for citizens of non-European origin.

    But as the dispute raged, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
broadcast a report charging that Mr. Day, a former lay pastor, holds
creationist beliefs. Mr. Day, who has repeatedly said he would not impose
his social and religious views on the rest of the nation, declined to
clarify his beliefs, adding that reporters should not ask Mr. Chretien, a
Roman Catholic, to explain the Immaculate Conception.

    In the media battle for Canada's hearts and minds, Alliance
strategists say reporters and anchors for CBC, a state company, are biased against the
Alliance because the tax-cutting party has promised to privatize the
company.

    On Tuesday, in the foyer of the CBC building here, a CBC reporter
asked Mr. Day if he planned to impose on Canada a "two-tier American-style
health system." Rod Love, an Alliance strategist, groaned and muttered,
"There they go again, trying to scare the children about the Americans."

    While "American style" is the buzzword used to demonize Alliance
health proposals in Liberal television ads, the idea of allowing a private health
care system to coexist alongside a state-run health care system is
actually more British than American. But, in this Commonwealth country,
where Queen Elizabeth is head of state, "British style" generally carries
positive connotations.

    With Canada's national health care system emerging as the fatal third
rail of Canadian politics, Mr. Day raised the white flag in the only
English-language campaign debate, holding before television cameras a
hand-lettered sign that read, "No two-tier health care."

    Despite Canadian defensiveness about many things American, the
election impasse south of the border is affecting the election here.

    Political strategists complain that obsession with the American
electoral limbo is so great that coverage of the American impasse is
eating up valuable television news time, pushing coverage of the Canadian
election to a secondary plane.