Week 1 of the election: where are the crowds?

By way of a thumbnail week-in-review, consider the list of Dion pitstops with the estimated number of Liberals who showed up to celebrate their leader's triumphant arrival in brackets.

There was the Ottawa kickoff (300), a Montreal event in his own riding with most of his Quebec candidates (200), a morning event at an MP's office (30), another at a longshot candidate's office (25), a barbecue in Napanee, Ont., (75), a rally in Pickering, Ont., for several area MPs (200), a women's forum in west Toronto (50), a Walkerton, Ont., speech (1,000 forced-to-attend students), an airport tarmac event in Thunder Bay, Ont., (30) and a Vancouver green housing announcement (35).

He saved his best performance and crowd for Friday afternoon at a University of Victoria town hall, but perhaps it was almost too successful. About 200 students overflowed the classroom and left another 200 disappointed students outside. He then had his biggest rally a few hours later (1,000). His Saturday luncheon, where he introduced his immigration plan, and which should have attracted a large crowd in this heavily ethnic riding, attracted only about 100 lunch guests.

Not to quibble, but given that student enthusiasm, one wonders why there's not more support from the tree-huggers and planet-savers spooked by the alleged Conservative climate-change-deniers now commanding an early lead. If this is indeed a titanic showdown between good and evil in the struggle to curb greenhouse gases, they should, at the very least, be disrupting the Conservative campaign's easy ride if they can't bring themselves to support Dion.