In the back of Greenbush General Store, in the heart of a tiny village an hour south of Canada's capital Ottawa, the locals get together twice a day to chew the fat over coffee and the odd cigarette.
What they are talking about should be enough to make Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and the local member of parliament, Joe Jordan, gag on their own coffee as they mull the next election, likely this year.
"Those Liberals, they're nothing but a bunch of [expletive deleted] crooks," came the opening volley from store owner Floyd Salmon.
Martin is eager to seek his own mandate as prime minister as soon as possible. He was elected in 1993, 1997 and 2000 as part of prime minister Jean Chretien's team, but he had his own ambitions and forced Chretien to step down in December after seizing control of the Liberal Party the month before.
Martin has done his best to portray himself as an honest agent of change, despite having served as Chretien's finance minister and most powerful cabinet member for eight-and-a-half years.
But Martin's message has been badly garbled en route to Greenbush, as well as to the rest of Canada, and suddenly Canada's grand old party looks entirely vulnerable in an election that had been expected to be called as early as May.
The Liberals have been racked by a number of scandals but none have struck a chord like the news this month of the "Sponsorgate" affair, where US$75 million evaporated in payments to agencies with close Liberal ties.
Polls show that that support for the party has slipped to a 12-year low of 35 to 36 percent, down from 48 percent before an explosive report was released by the federal auditor general on the spending scandal.
`Just isn't right'
"The son of a b ... should be hung, right along with Chretien," Earl Brayton said of Martin. "He's just as crooked as the rest of them."
Michael Curran, a stout man who describes himself as a jack-of-all-trades, nodded agreement, and also searched for the proper words to describe his displeasure with the Liberals' intention to legalize gay marriage.
"It's a thing that just isn't right," he finally declared.
Greenbush sits in the heart of a largely agricultural electoral district that Liberal Joe Jordan won in 2000 by a mere 55 votes out of a total of more than 47,000. And Jordan, like many Liberals in the electorally crucial provinces of Ontario and Quebec, will be in the fight of his political life to continue to represent it.
A few weeks ago pundits thought the loss of Jordan's and similar seats could cut into Martin's majority in parliament, but the stunning slide in the polls since the Sponsorgate news broke has raised the possibility of the Liberals being relegated to a minority government or even worse.
"When you add the marriage issue to Sponsorgate, I think it'll make for a very interesting election," said Jordan's likely rival, Gordon Brown of the newly merged Conservative Party.
The merger of two right-wing parties -- the Canadian Alliance and the slightly more liberal Progressive Conservatives -- has ended a split in the vote that has helped the Liberals to three straight parliamentary majorities.
If the Alliance and Conservatives votes were counted together in the 2000 federal election, they would have taken 25 of the 100 seats won by the Liberals in Ontario, including Jordan's seat.
The Conservatives promise more fiscal restraint, getting tougher on crime, a more robust military, and better relations with the US than the Liberals have had.
The next election must be held by November 2005, but the ruling party can call one any time and usually does so by the end of its fourth year in power -- meaning an election would normally be expected no later than this November.
A brand name
Jordan hopes the majority of those who voted for the old Conservatives are so-called Red Tories -- fiscally conservative but socially liberal -- who will vote for him rather than for the new Conservative Party, which has the benefit of a brand name stretching back into the 1800s.
In this district many people said they vote the way their families have always voted, whether Liberal or Conservative.
Conversations with two dozen citizens around the district failed to turn up any who voted for the Progressive Conservatives in 2000 and are thinking of going Liberal now.
And Jordan also has to worry about erosion of his core Liberal support, both over marriage and financial mismanagement.
Liberals have often found fertile political ground among Roman Catholics, but some have been turned off by the government's intention to legislate gay marriage.
"There's no way a Catholic today can be voting Liberal," said Tony Jozefowicz, a retired fighter pilot from Spencerville who voted Liberal in 2000 and for most of his life.
Jordan said he would not expect many opponents of gay marriage to vote for him, but Jozefowicz is an example of a former supporter who is bailing over marriage.
At the Quickie convenience store in Brockville, on the shores of the St Lawrence River, cashier Karie Smail is indifferent like many other young people on the marriage issue but she is seeing red about the diversion of public funds.
"There's so much that could have been done with that money ... that bothers me so much more," she said, adding that she had not decided how she would vote, if at all.
Jordan recognizes the challenge, particularly as Martin had built his reputation on running a string of balanced budgets.
"If we're arguing fiscal competence as one of our trump cards, these things aren't helpful," he said. "I think we are running the finances of the nation very competently, but it's clearly something they're going to pounce on."
Critical to the Liberals' fortunes will be whether Canadians eventually forgive them for the scandal.
They hold 169 of 301 seats in the House of Commons. In the run-up to Martin's taking power, his aides had looked to Quebec to make up for a possible loss of 20 Ontario seats.
But the financial scandal has reversed their fortunes in Quebec, which has 75 seats, so much so that unless the anger fades they would lose seats there too. To complete the Liberal challenge is resurgence on the left, especially in cities, from the minority New Democrats.
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