An angry crowd and a rising unemployment rate gave Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien's re-election campaign a bumpy ride Friday.
Jostling demonstrators demanding to meet Chretien blocked a media bus that was sent in advance of his planned inauguration of an oil platform, 90 miles west of St. John's, the capital of this impoverished Atlantic province.Chretien's bus, never close to the crowd, eventually had to turn back, and the prime minister later flew to the platform by helicopter, but by then the photo opportunity had turned into a public relations disaster.
"An attempt to hold a bus filled with journalists until the prime minister gives in to demands is unacceptable in a democratic society," Chretien told a news conference in St. John's.
For his Liberals, the labor disturbance could not have come on a worse day - the same morning as the federal agency Statistics Canada said Canada's unemployment rate climbed to 9.6 percent in April from 9.3 percent.
Canadian Auto Workers President Buzz Hargrove was among the 300 protesters shouting "We want jobs" and deploring the federal government's tough fishing policies.
"Stop the attack on social programs," read one sign. "Empty nets, empty promises," said another.
The demonstrators rocked the media bus, broke its windshield wipers and prevented it from moving onto the site of the massive Hibernia oil project that Chretien was to have toured.
They were convinced he was aboard and insisted on a meeting, letting the bus go only after about 2 1/2 hours.
The widely awaited jobless figure will be the last such statistic released before the June 2 election that Chretien called, 1 1/2 years before he was required to, in order to cash in on a lead in the polls.
Liberal spokesmen noted that 33,000 new jobs had been created, though this was swamped by the 79,000 people who joined, or participated in, the labor force.
"Of course there is a higher participation rate than we expected. It's because people have more confidence and people who were discouraged are coming back into the labor force," Chretien said.
Nonetheless, the jobless rate has been between 9 and 10 percent for most of his term as prime minister.
Chretien's chief economic legacy has been to wrestle Canada's chronic budget deficits to the ground, thus helping interest rates plummet. In cutting spending, he has won the disapproval of big labor and the leftist New Democratic Party.
"The choices the Liberals have made betray the future," NDP leader Alexa McDonough said in Vancouver.
The Reform Party and the Conservative Party seized on the numbers as proof that tax cuts were needed, especially on payrolls.
"Today we had further bad news about the Liberal record - 1.5 million unemployed," the Conservatives' Jean Charest said.