Anticipating an imminent election call, NDP Leader Jack Layton says he is prepared to wage a heated battle for votes in the province of Quebec.

Looking ahead, Layton is optimistic Canadians' thirst for change will prove great enough to vote his NDP into government.

"We have excellent candidates right across the country," Layton told CTV's Question Period. "We're going to offer a very positive alternative and we have a record of having shown that we can get things done in the House."

Should Canadians return a minority government; however, as many are predicting appears the likely outcome of the looming wintertime campaign, Layton refuses to concede the balance of power to the Bloc Quebecois.

Instead, the NDP leader says his party will field quality candidates in all 75 Quebec ridings, prepared to campaign on "a positive alternative for federalism" in the province.

"We're just going to be out there with a very positive message for Quebecers -- that it's time that a federal government showed respect for the people of Quebec," he said, explaining how that approach should resonate with voters who still associate the sponsorship fiasco with federal Liberals.

That may be a tall order, but NDP campaign strategist Brad Lavigne says it's one Layton must rise to if the party is to build on the 19 seats it won in the 2004 election.

For Lavigne, there's good reason to expect his party to make inroads in Quebec.

"There's social democratic principles that run through much of the province," Lavigne said on Question Period, confident his party can satisfy those voters.

"I think what is vital in Quebec is that there are progressive Quebecers looking for a clean, federalist alternative. They don't get that in the Liberal party."

Tories Eye Quebec

Stephen Harper's Conservatives are also counting on Quebecers looking for change. And they're rallying the resources to reach out to them.

According to a report in the Hill Times last week, the Conservatives have nine senior Quebec advisors working in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition. That is three more than the six the paper confirmed are handling Quebec matters in the PMO.

As Conservative national campaign co-director Michel Fortier explained, the Official Opposition is aiming to provide an even more compelling alternative.

In Quebec, Fortier hopes an effective campaign bolstered by lingering anger over the sponsorship program, will propel his party into new seats.

"I see two big chapters here," Fortier told QP, previewing the Conservative campaign in an interview from Montreal. "One: addressing the Liberal incompetence, and also showing Canadians the ideas that we have for Canada."

In the context of Quebec, Fortier is confident voters asked to contrast his party's plans with the Liberal record will find good reasons to vote Harper into the Prime Minister's Office.

"When we talk about vision of Canada, these (Liberals) have been announcing billions and billions of dollars of promises in the past few weeks," he said.

"I don't call that a vision."

Insisting that the other parties have vowed to keep Liberal spending promises in the event Prime Minister Paul Martin is voted out of office, Liberal strategist Scott Reid denies his party is trying to buy goodwill.

"What we're doing is fulfilling the commitments we made," Reid told QP, turning the tables on the Opposition.

"The difficulty we have, of course, is that the election timetable has been moved up because the NDP decided they would rather work with Mr. Harper to force a Christmas election than work with us."

Bloc Strength

But no matter the other leaders' convictions, strategies and intentions, they face a significant challenge upsetting leader Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois.

Recent polling results by the Strategic Counsel showed the federal Conservatives with just seven per cent support among decided voters in Quebec. The supposedly battered-by-scandal Liberals, on the other hand, registered 25 per cent support.

Both the NDP and the federal Green Party trailed with six per cent each, while the Bloc came out as a clear favourite with 57 per cent of respondents.

Bolstered by the soaring approval ratings in his home province, Duceppe appears bound for all but certain election victory in Quebec.

Now far from the ridicule he endured for years after a 1997 cheese factory tour for which he donned an unflattering hairnet, the 58-year-old Bloc leader has since built a reputation as the competent, if humourless, leader best-suited to representing Quebec in Ottawa.

With that in mind, pundits and pollsters are predicting the Bloc will claim all but approximately 12 of the 75 seats in Quebec, with the rest going to the Liberals. The Liberals elected 21 MPs from Quebec in 2004.