Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s long-running quest to attain a majority government was finally achieved Monday in a landmark federal election that also saw Jack Layton’s NDP surge dramatically to become the country’s official Opposition for the first time in that party’s history.
Two other leaders – Michael Ignatieff of the Liberals and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois – went down to defeat in disastrous campaigns for their parties, while Green leader Elizabeth May won her party’s first seat in Parliament, another milestone victory in an election marked by seismic shifts in Canada’s political landscape.
"What a great night," Harper exclaimed as he addressed cheering supporters in Calgary. "And friends, I have to say it: A strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government.
"We are grateful, deeply honoured – in fact, humbled – by the decisive endorsement of so many Canadians. We shall be faithful to the trust that you have reposed in us," Harper continued. "Whether or not you cast a vote for our party today, our government must and will stand on guard for all regions – and friends, we shall do that faithfully."
Harper then thanked constituents in his riding of Calgary Southwest for allowing him, once again, to follow "in the footsteps of Preston Manning" – a former MP for the constituency and the founder of the Reform movement that gave rise to the reborn Conservative party now led by Harper.
"Our priority is to deliver on our programs of support for families and the senior citizens of our country," he told cheering supporters.
In Toronto, Layton told a roaring crowd: "We’re going to work very hard . . . each and every day to earn the trust that Canadians have placed in us. I want to say that I’ve always favoured proposition over opposition. But we will oppose the government when it’s off-track."
Meanwhile, Ignatieff was ousted as an MP from his downtown Toronto riding but told supporters he would stay on, for now, as leader.
He acknowledged the epic scale of his party’s defeat in a concession speech shortly after 11 p.m. ET, congratulating Harper and Layton – "two opponents who’ve had the better of the night," he said.
"Democracy teaches hard lessons and we have to learn them all," Ignatieff added, offering to remain as Liberal leader as the party tries to recover from the worst showing in its distinguished history as Canada’s most successful political organization.
Ignatieff insisted that the party’s "deep and ancient tradition" will carry on.
And Duceppe was defeated in his own Montreal-area riding as the Bloc lost official party status with its monumental collapse.
The mood was grim Monday night as Bloc supporters saw the impact of the NDP wave sweeping away seats the party has held for its entire 18-year existence.
"I have been honoured to represent you," Duceppe told supporters in Montreal, announcing he was resigning as leader.
"This time, Quebecers wanted to try something else," he said. "I am leaving, but others will follow – until Quebec becomes a country."
Both the Conservatives and NDP were picking up seats everywhere from a wounded, Ignatieff-led Liberal party that lost five of its East Coast MPs and dozens of others throughout Ontario – its last major bastion of strength – and Quebec.
And the Liberals’ woes were shared by Duceppe’s Bloc Quebecois, which was headed for utter decimation – and perhaps as few as four seats – in the province the separatist party has long wished to lead out of Confederation.
Meanwhile, May, a high-profile environmentalist, made more history by becoming the first member of the Green party elected to the House of Commons.
She defeated Conservative incumbent and sports minister Gary Lunn in the Vancouver Island riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.
"Today," a jubilant May told an audience of Green supporters, "we proved that Canadians want change in politics."
By midnight Ottawa time, the unofficial election results had the Conservatives with 166 seats, the NDP at 103, the Liberals at 34, the Bloc at 4 and the Greens with one.
In Ontario and Quebec, where 181 seats were in play, a Conservative wave west of the Ottawa River and an NDP tide to the east largely determined the outcome of Canada’s 41st general election.
The Tories took more than 70 of Ontario’s 106 seats, an increase of about 20. And the NDP will send about 60 of Quebec’s 75 MPs to Parliament.
The New Democrats held just one riding in Quebec – Thomas Mulcair’s seat in Outremont – before the election.
In Calgary, at a rally of Harper’s supporters, Conservatives cheered and celebrated as the results rolled in from across the country – confirming that Canadians, in large numbers, had given Harper the trust he had sought during the five-week campaign.
Harper, for the first time in the four campaigns he has led as Conservative leader since 2004, explicitly called on Canadians to give his party a majority mandate. The central thrust of his election pitch was the Conservative record on maintaining a healthy Canadian economy at a time of historic upheaval in global financial markets.
But a key corollary to his message was the prospect of what he called an "illegitimate," "reckless" and "ramshackle" coalition of opposition parties – backed by the separatist Bloc – if the Conservatives were denied a majority.
And while the majority result means no alliance of opposition parties will be able to topple Harper’s Tories for the next four years, the NDP’s remarkable rise has profoundly altered Canada’s political map.
Mario Laframboise, the Bloc’s chief organizer and outgoing MP for Argenteuil-Mirabel-Papineau riding, described her successful NDP rival as the beneficiary of an unbeatable force: "In my riding, my adversary was never present in the riding, no debates, no signs," he said. "It was like fighting against the wind. That is politics."
The NDP juggernaut in Quebec, which gave the party a stunning 59 seats, not only wiped out the Bloc’s 47-member caucus but also toppled high-profile Liberal and Conservative members, including foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon in the Gatineau-area riding of Pontiac.
Both the Liberals, who had 14 seats in Quebec heading into the election, and the Conservatives, who had 11, dropped to just six seats in the province.
The "orange tide" that pushed Layton’s NDP to unprecedented levels of popular support ahead of Monday’s vote also reached parts of Atlantic Canada and delivered two new seats to the party there. The NDP’s momentum then carried westward across Quebec and Ontario, catapulting the party’s seat count – never higher than 43 in its history – to more than double that number.
The initial NDP gains in the East – one seat in Nova Scotia and one in Newfoundland – both came at the expense of the Liberals, as did three seats grabbed by the Conservatives in the eastern provinces, two in New Brunswick and one in Labrador.
Across Atlantic Canada, where the 17 Liberal incumbents at the outset of the campaign represented more than half of the region’s 32 seats, a strong showing under Ignatieff seemed crucial to thwart predictions of a historic collapse for the party of Laurier, King and Trudeau.
While the Liberals kept four of six seats they held in Newfoundland and Labrador before the election, it lost incumbent Siobhan Coady’s St. John’s riding to the NDP’s Ryan Cleary and Todd Russell’s Labrador seat to aboriginal leader Peter Penashue.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, were looking to steal seats on the East Coast – primarily from the Liberals – to boost their pre-election total of 11 and set the stage for a landmark majority victory by the time polls closed hours later on the West Coast.
One of the two seats the party gained in New Brunswick marked the return of former Progressive Conservative MP Bernard Valcourt, 18 years after he last sat in the House of Commons.
The NDP, with just four seats in Atlantic Canada when the election was called, saw major opportunities for growth in Nova Scotia and elsewhere as the party’s unanticipated tide of popularity – driven largely by Layton’s impressive campaign – began sweeping the country after the Easter weekend.
In Ontario, the Conservatives held 51 seats heading into Monday’s vote – nearly half of the 106 up for grabs in the province – while the Liberals’ 37 seats represented the struggling party’s most important base of support nationally. In the end, the Tories took at least 70 of the province’s 106 seats and the Liberals watched their total plummet by more than 20.
Besides Ignatieff, several other high-profile Liberal incumbents in Ontario, including hockey legend Ken Dryden, Mark Holland and Ruby Dhalla, were defeated by Conservative candidates.
Former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae, a Liberal, was re-elected in Toronto.
In Quebec, Stephane Dion and Justin Trudeau were survivors of the Liberal collapse. But former astronaut Marc Garneau, hailed as a star candidate when recruited by the Liberals, was not re-elected in his Montreal-area riding.
The NDP’s surging fortunes nationally suggested the party might build significantly on its complement of 17 MPs in Ontario – including Layton and his wife, Olivia Chow, in two downtown Toronto ridings.
And the party did push its total up to 22 seats in the province, according to late Monday results.
At the same time, however, potential vote-splitting between NDP and Liberal candidates had raised the possibility that the Conservatives could benefit.
And vote-splitting did appear to be a significant factor in the huge Conservative victory, with about 20 new Ontario MPs added to its caucus, pushing the party past the 155 seats needed to control Parliament.
There were no major changes in seat totals in Western Canada, although the Liberals lost three MPs in B.C. – including former NDP premier Ujjal Dosanjh.
Harper and his senior advisers had earlier settled in for a long night on Monday in Calgary – far from certain they would win the majority government they consider so key to their political future.
As the polls closed in Atlantic Canada, there were signs that the NDP’s surge in popularity could start a wave that would have ripple effects throughout the country and stall the Conservatives short of the pivotal 155-seat threshold.
Harper watched the TV coverage of the election results with his family at a Calgary hotel.
Nearby, his supporters gathered at the Telus Convention Centre and waited for him to deliver a speech to them once the election results were clear.
Liberal support began to bleed visibly after early results in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario showed the party facing major upsets in many key races.
The Conservative stranglehold on the three Prairie provinces, where the party held 48 of the region’s 56 seats before the election, was expected to be challenged by the NDP’s rise. But that did not materialize.
At the start of the campaign, the New Democrats had just three seats in Manitoba and one in Alberta. The Liberals held two in Manitoba and one in Saskatchewan, where veteran MP Ralph Goodale was re-elected.
The three federal ridings in Canada’s Arctic territories – evenly divided between the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP prior to Monday’s election – were all seen to be in play at the outset of the campaign. Larry Bagnell, the Liberal incumbent in the Yukon, was defeated by a Tory opponent.
The election was held after a 37-day campaign that began on March 26, when Harper visited Gov. Gen. David Johnston to formally report the defeat of his government in Parliament the day before.
At the time of dissolution, the Conservatives held 143 seats – 12 short of the 155 needed for a majority – the opposition Liberals held 77, the Bloc had 47 and the NDP 36. There were two independent MPs and three vacant seats.
Harper’s repeated warnings about an opposition coalition – a governing scenario deemed legitimate by constitutional scholars – were prompted by the ill-fated alliance attempted in 2008 by Layton and former Liberal leader Stephane Dion, with backing from Duceppe. But Harper’s attack was somewhat blunted by charges that he had led a similar "co-opposition" bid for power in 2004 and had spoken favourably about such parliamentary arrangements earlier in his political career.
The Ignatieff-led Liberals initially focused their campaign on the historic ruling in March that the Conservative government was in "contempt of Parliament" over its failure to adequately disclose details of its spending plans on a suite of justice reforms, including prison construction.
But Ignatieff’s framing of the election as a test of whether Canadians trusted the "secretive" and "autocratic" Harper to continue governing didn’t appear to resonate with the electorate. And Ignatieff’s evasions on the coalition question appeared to undermine his own trust and leadership profile – already hammered by months of Conservative attack ads, in advance of the election, targeting the Liberal leader’s career as an expatriate writer and scholar in Britain and the U.S.
The Liberal campaign re-focused on the party’s record as a defender of universal health care and its "family pack" platform of proposed federal payouts, a program aimed at assisting middle-class Canadians who are squeezed between caring for elderly relatives and financing their children’s post-secondary education.
Meanwhile, the NDP campaign – buoyed by Layton’s impressive performances in the televised leaders debates and his steady climb in leadership ratings – highlighted the party’s plans to introduce a cap-and-trade system to fight climate change, to cap credit-card interest rates at five per cent and to shift Conservative corporate tax breaks to smaller businesses.
A 10-point lead in most polls at the start of the election suggested Harper was on the cusp of achieving his long-sought majority. But as the campaign reached its fourth week, an unexpected surge in NDP support – first seen in polling in Quebec but later elsewhere in the country – forced all parties to abruptly recalibrate their messaging and prepare for scenarios that would have seemed unthinkable when the election was called.
Party strategists increased their attention on key "swing" ridings in Quebec, southern Ontario and southern British Columbia, where close races in previous elections suggested the chances of "flipping" seats to other parties was strongest.
Amid the NDP surge, Layton’s cap-and-trade energy plan – intended as a key source of federal revenues as early as next year – came under increased scrutiny as critics questioned its feasibility and the overall budget numbers of a party poised to become the official Opposition, or even the leading player in a minority governing alliance.
And the NDP’s proposed measures to bolster French-language rights in Quebec and to bring the province fully into the Canada’s constitutional fold – both aimed at attracting "soft nationalist" votes away from the Bloc Quebecois – became a target for rival leaders.
Just days before Monday’s vote, Layton dismissed as a transparent "smear" a Sun media report about a 1996 incident in which Layton, then a Toronto city councillor, was warned by police to keep clear of a massage parlour suspected of operating as a bawdy house.
On the eve of election day, however, polls suggested the NDP’s unprecedented popularity was holding. It emerged that the central challenge for the party was whether its popular support could be translated into seats in the House of Commons by getting new backers to the polls on election day – particularly in Quebec.
But those fears were, in the end, unfounded.
Both Ignatieff and Duceppe, their parties facing sharp drops in the polls as a result of the NDP surge, had made Layton and Harper equal targets in speeches during the final week of the campaign.
And Harper, whose party stood to benefit from centre-left vote-splitting under a modest rise in NDP fortunes, faced the prospect that his hoped-for majority was in jeopardy as the Layton-led "orange crush" increasingly appeared to be consolidating the non-Conservative vote and attracting support from key target groups – including women and Quebec nationalists – needed for the Tories to reach the 155-seat target.
In broader terms, the 2011 election campaign was notable for its apparent re-invigorating of the country’s political process. After the 2008 election’s record-setting low voter turnout – just 58.8 per cent nationally – this year’s campaign was highlighted by student "vote mobs" aimed at banishing youth apathy from Canadian democracy, and the unprecedented use of social media, particularly Twitter, in spreading election news and driving debate.
rboswell@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/randyboswell
With files from Mark Kennedy, Althia Raj, Tobi Cohen and Carmen Chai.
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