Political potpourri for Thursday October 2:

ABC From Sea to Sea

ABC - Tory organizer blames ABC campaign for party's woes - Leo Power, a veteran of federal politics and the Conservative Party of Canada's campaign co-chair for Newfoundland and Labrador, said raising money and recruiting volunteers has proved difficult. "We're obviously challenged for resources, both people — it's difficult to recruit volunteers under this current scenario of an ABC [Progressive Conservative Premier Danny William's Anything But Conservative] campaign — and fundraising is challenging as well," he said. Power said his party's best hope of winning a seat is in the riding of Avalon with incumbent candidate Fabian Manning. (CBC)

[Editor: Manning's voting record. In related news, Premier Williams said he's delighted with policy proposal commitments made to him by both the Liberal and New Democratic parties.]

ANDREW COYNE - Green? Who, me? Harper has a green plan too, though he'd rather not talk very much about it right now - In sum, the Conservative plan is just as costly (per tonne of emissions reduced) as the Liberals', twice as complicated (emissions trading markets are, as Europe has learned, fiendishly difficult to design: just the task of ensuring credits are based on "real, incremental, verifiable" reductions would take several pages to explain), and probably half as effective. (Not that there's anything wrong with cap-and-trade. But to get anywhere near our targets, we're probably going to need both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade, as indeed the Liberals propose.) (Macleans)

[Editor: David Suzuki explains why he thinks a carbon tax is the way to go (CBC)]

PAUL WELLS - Foreign policy? What foreign policy? - On the most fundamental matters of statecraft, Harper simply isn't serious. In the shuffle that followed, Peter MacKay replaced O'Connor, only to be replaced at Foreign Affairs by Maxime Bernier, who in turn was replaced by David Emerson after Bernier ran into problems with his briefs. The highlight of Bernier's tenure as Canada's emissary to the world — I will restrict myself here to the professional highlight — was a trip to Afghanistan with boxes of Jos. Louis snack cakes for the troops. (Macleans)