excanvas not working in IE8

Question

I am having issues with excanvas not rendering in IE8. Here is where I initialize the canvas.

var canvas = document.getElementById("map");
if (typeof (G_vmlCanvasManager) != 'undefined') {
    canvas = G_vmlCanvasManager.initElement(canvas);
}
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.fillStyle = "#656600"; // sets colors of counties
ctx.strokeStyle = "#ff0000";
ctx.flobalAlpha = 0.33; // set transparency

<img name="texasmapofcounties" src=../texas-map-of-counties.jpg"style="position: absolute; height: 719px; width: 800px; left: 0px; top: 0;" alt="map of texas counties" />
<canvas id="map" width="800" height="719" style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0; opacity: 1;"></canvas>
<div id="map_blind"  style="position: absolute; height: 719px; width: 800px; left: 0px; top: 0;"></div>
<img name="texasmapofcounties" src="../texas-map-of-counties.jpg" width="800" height="719" border="0" id="texasmapofcounties" usemap="#m_texasmapofcounties" alt="" style="position: absolute; height: 719px; width: 800px; left: 0px; top: 0; -moz-user-select: none; opacity: 0;" />    

The purpose of the site is if a county in the state of Texas has a "Famous Tree" in it the county is colored green. Then a user is able to select the county and click it for a pop up list of trees. The functionality works in IE7 IE9, FF, Chrome,etc... Its just IE8 and Excanvas are not working properly.

Any help will be appreciated!