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A. Well, people will continue to caricaturise me as they wish. But the more people start to get to know me, the more the media and commentators refuse to believe what I’m saying, that I really do want to move on to other things, the more they’re going to miss the boat a little bit … we have an enormous amount of work to do.

And as I’ve said, if a provincial premier comes to see me and says, I have a solution that will bring Quebec, that will result in a formal acceptance of the Constitution by Quebec’s National Assembly, I’d be completely open to that. But I’m not going to waste more time and political capital going in circles, and re-opening divisions that are less and less relevant for Quebecers.

Q. (Switching back to English). On the issue of Ontario: Ontario is 121 seats after the redistribution that’s going to happen before the next election. So it really is still, demographically, the ten-tonne gorilla in the House, about a third of the seats. And a lot of those new seats are going to be in areas where the Liberals have in the last ten years not been strong – like the Greater Toronto Area, the 905 area. What do you say to Ontarians who are trying to decide whether you have something to offer them?

A. I’ve spent an awful lot of time during this campaign in Ontario, across Ontario, as I have across the country. But obviously the math certainly is here for Ontario in terms of where we need to make gains, as well as across the country … people are worried about their jobs. People are worried about their future. People are worried about specific issues from manufacturing, to education, to teachers, to be specific, to health care. These are the kinds of issues that resonate right across the country. Ontario has both natural resources as we look at the development of the “ring of fire” (northern resource area), it has challenges around shifting demographics. For me, issues we bring up elsewhere across the country always resonate here in Ontario but with a particular sensibility and sensitivity that I’m extremely attuned to.