The Liberals traded their last election’s dirty jet for an even older gas-guzzling carbon-belching Air Inuit 737 this time, but road-touring the election in a rented car seemed to dictate a green shift of a different kind.

My 2006 election protest at the outrageous gouge the party leaders inflict on tagalong journalists — $9,300 per week plus hotels and taxes — was a rented Hummer complete with beer, er, juice fridge, a fearlessly heavy-footed photographer named Steve and power hookups so we could file stories on the fly.

Trouble was, you could almost feel the brute getting lighter with every snowdrift we hit during that Christmas tour as tankfuls of gasoline combusted at a truly astonishing rate, which explains why, in an era when a $1.20 litre is considered an OK price, the iconic Hummer is now on the auto sector’s most endangered species list.

Even so, a pair of intrepid newspaper columnists managed to spend an entire week chasing the leaders around southern Ontario for the price of just one day on the official national tour. For economic — if not environmental — reasons a repeat road trip seemed in order, minus the military-vehicle mode of transportation.

Curiously, riding in a Hummer didn’t seem to trigger an environmental backlash just 32 months ago, except for a good-natured expletive hurled at us from current Green Party leader Elizabeth May as we passed her on an escalator.

But times have changed and an election featuring a Green Shift carbon tax referendum justified the move from Hummer to hybrid.

That’s a long way of explaining how I reached Chatham yesterday in a rented Prius that drove like a 110-horsepower golf cart in gridlocked Toronto traffic and has me sitting in the southwestern corner of Ontario down barely half a tank.

Toyota Canada agreed to rent us a hard-to-find Prius for four days, complete with a distracting video screen that tracks fuel consumption and has me fixated on keeping highway fuel use below five litres per 100 kilometres, even while keeping pace with the 130-kilometre-an-hour average speed of Highway 401 motorists.

But the cleaner mode of transportation is not the reason to depart the official tours as this campaign reaches the midway point, particularly now that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has curtailed his exposure to one private photo-op and one campaign rally per day with a few minutes of media chat time in between.

It’s for an up-close look at an election people seem determined to ignore, even though strategists consider this the “hinge week” where voters start locking in their choices.

There’s not one election sign visible from the highway in the two-hour-plus dash to Chatham from Toronto. Even in towns and villages along the way.

But beyond taking the election pulse, there’s a new secondary challenge on this road trip: my drive to get back to Toronto on the original tank of gasoline.

That objective has roughly the odds of the Liberals forming a majority government, but at least it’s a green shift goal that’s easy to understand and, having rejected the Hummer alternative, it’s a plus for the environment.

General Motors Corp. plans to distribute marketing materials for its Hummer brand and a French transmission plant in October as part of a plan to accelerate the $15-billion cost-cutting and fund-raising plan it announced in July, Treasurer Walter Borst said Wednesday in a presentation to analysts.
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Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Leveraged Finance Conference, Borst said GM is progressing on a fast pace in the cash-generating plan it announced July 15 and has hired “additional outside resources to help us meet or exceed these targets.”

Borst said GM hopes to raise $2 billion to $4 billion in cash through asset sales, but is considering the sale of assets “significantly in excess of this amount.”

“I would anticipate additional announcements for you here in the fourth quarter,” he said. “We believe we can monetize certain assets without impacting the strategic direction of the company.”

GM issued what it refers to as its liquidity plan on July 15 to quiet Wall Street concerns that the company may not have enough cash to sustain itself until 2010. While the plan initially quelled that concern, more recent mayhem in financial markets again has the automaker confronting worries that it doesn’t have enough cash to make it through the current downturn and may now have more trouble raising money.

GM Daewoo said Wednesday that it will draw the rest of a $2-billion line of credit from the Korea Development Bank for new car development and facility improvements. A GM Daewoo spokesman said the loan is unrelated to GM’s North American restructuring.

GM shares fell 37 cents to $10.35.