Suddenly they noticed this English guy getting some attention!`

The rumours of a Conservative breakthrough in Quebec, may not be as far fetched as once believed. The Bloc Quebecois has suddenly decided that this Harper guy, might actually gain a foothold in the land of the Bloc and thus have decided to go on the attack. A sure sign that something must be up in the land that once was barren land for anything resembling a Conservative and especially an anglo Conservative at that!

The final weekend of the campaign saw ads appear in rural Quebec newspapers suggesting that a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for an Alberta agenda. Featuring a cowboy hat and warnings of Calgary setting the course for the future of Quebec, the Bloc suggested that voting for the Conservatives was taking the province into the clutches of the blue eyed sheiks of Alberta, allowing them to do as they wish with the dreams and aspirations of the land that the Bloc wishes were a country. Built around the theme of the Kyoto protocol, Duceppe suggested that the Conservatives would bend over backwards to appease Alberta while they ignored the wishes of Quebec.

In an interesting bit of theatre, Gilles Duceppe said that by voting Conservative, Quebecers would be supporting Alberta oil companies over Quebec aluminum smelters. Somehow the subject of transfer payments (Alberta makes them, Quebec collects them) never came up in the demonization of the various Conservative positions, nor the announcement by Harper to address the fiscal imbalances in Confederation, something that has attracted the attention of the francophone mainstream press in Quebec.

With Harper finding his party endorsed by the likes of La Presse newspaper and by Mario Dumont of the Action Democratique, its no wonder Duceppe has taken to borrowing a page from the desperate Liberal campaign to warn of an Alberta apocalypse on the horizon.

At the start of the campaign, the Bloc had stated that they would get over 50% of the vote and most likely make the Liberal party disappear in Quebec. They probably won't achieve the latter and now even the former seems beyond reach, even worse for the seperatist party, a lot of that former Liberal vote may migrate to the Bleus, something not even considered back in November!

Monday night may bring more than a few surprises to Canadian television sets, not many bigger than the story that seems to be developing in Quebec.