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Party leaders scatter from Vancouver Island to Montreal as campaign starts Week 3

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and Green Leader Elizabeth May are both in Montreal today, as the third week of the federal election campaign begins.

Scheer is promising a Conservative government would launch a judicial inquiry to find out what happened during the SNC-Lavalin affair.

He made the pledge during a visit to Justin Trudeau’s Montreal riding of Papineau this morning, saying an inquiry would finally provide Canadians the answers they deserve about the government’s involvement in SNC-Lavalin’s criminal prosecution.

Scheer will spend the rest of the morning visiting two other Montreal ridings with candidates in what have historically been among the safest Liberal ridings in the city: Mount Royal and Saint-Leonard-Saint-Michel.

Read more: Scheer promises Tory government would launch SNC-Lavalin inquiry; Trudeau focuses on environment

Mount Royal has gone for the Liberals in every election since 1940; it was the seat of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre for nearly 20 years.

Saint-Leonard-Saint-Michel has elected Liberals since it was created in the 1980s, though its three MPs have been Alfonso Gagliano, a minister brought down in the sponsorship scandal of the early 2000s; Massimo Pacetti, whom Justin Trudeau expelled from the Liberal caucus in 2014 over allegations he’d harassed another MP; and Nicola Di Iorio, who stopped showing up in the House of Commons before eventually resigning last winter.

Still, Conservatives have never come close to winning there.

May is to speak in the afternoon about the role she sees Quebec playing in the Greens’ vision of a Canada powered by renewable energy.

Trudeau started his day in Sudbury, Ont., continuing a string of environment-related announcements at a conservation area, before whistlestopping his way southeast to a rally in Peterborough, where cabinet minister Maryam Monsef is fighting to keep her seat.

The Liberal leader said one-fourth of Canada’s land will be given protected status over the next six years if his party is re-elected.

He also promised to protect one-fourth of Canada’s oceans by 2025.

The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh is spending a third day in a row in British Columbia, talking mainly about housing in events on Vancouver Island. He’s playing defence: Vancouver Island is where the Greens see their best chances of picking up seats, after a byelection win over the New Democrats in Nanaimo-Ladysmith last May.

Singh is starting in Campbell River and plans to roadtrip south to Nanaimo.

And Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party continues his own trip to the West, spreading his populist message in Calgary after spending Wednesday in Vancouver.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2019.

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