ST-TITE, Que. - Stephen Harper appears to have suspended news conferences for the duration of the election campaign.
Aides to the Conservative leader said he did not plan to take any questions Sunday, and had no news conference scheduled for Monday, the last day of the campaign.
Harper ended his five-week-long daily campaign ritual during a swing through Quebec.
After his customary morning speech to a partisan crowd, instead of taking questions Harper served beans and scrambled eggs.
He was also given a pair of cowboy boots from a group of Stetson-wearing admirers during his stop in St-Tite, the province's country-music capital and home to a popular Western festival.
In his speech, Harper repeated his message that Quebecers would be sidelining themselves by voting for the Bloc Quebecois.
He took exception to the way Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe has, in his opinion, demonized him during the campaign.
Harper dismissed suggestions that his platform is right-wing -- and said it's pro-family instead.
He said Canada has weathered the current economic storm better than the United States because his government has made better choices than the American one, including cutting the GST.
Economists have argued that the cut on consumption taxes was the least productive tax cut his government could have introduced.
But Harper said the GST cuts and his other income-tax reductions have contributed to Canada's robust job-creation numbers.
One thing Harper has not said is how much he expects his party's climate-change plan to cost -- and some reporters had been hoping to extract a dollar estimate from him Sunday.
The Conservative leader has spent the entire campaign hammering away at the idea that the Liberals' Green Shift would spell economic catastrophe. The Liberals say their $15-billion plan would tax greenhouse gas emissions at $40 per tonne, and cut income taxes.
But the Conservatives also have a plan to cut emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels, by 2020. When asked Saturday to price his own plan, Harper merely said it wouldn't cost much.
He also said it could lead to a three- or four-per-cent rise in energy costs.
Reporters had been hoping to get a more precise number out of him before election day, so that the costs of his plan could be compared with the one he has spent five weeks campaigning against.
