Tories Return To Power; Liberals Reduced To Third Place After NDP
Canadians gave Prime Minister Stephen Harper his first majority government Monday night, a ringing endorsement of his handling of the economy through one of the most devastating recessions in memory.Harper campaigned on the need for a strong, stable, majority government to keep Canada’s economy on the road to recovery.
He warned of the perils of a coalition lurking in the shadows and the dangers it posed at a time a steady hand was needed to keep the country on track.
Jack Layton rode Harper’s surge with one of his own as the NDP chief won an historic number of seats to become the official Opposition leader.
Both Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe lost their seats in the blue and orange tidal wave that swept the country.
Elizabeth May won her B.C. seat to become the first Green MP elected to Parliament.
The political winds that blew across the Canadian landscape left Ignatieff’s Liberals battered as the third-place party in the House of Commons. The Liberals suffered their worst electoral defeat and have a long road ahead to rebuild.
The separatist Bloc was reduced to a seats after voters rejected Duceppe and years of separatism and flocked to Layton.
A dejected Ignatieff – who said he would stay on as leader unless the party chose otherwise - praised both Harper and Layton for their historic triumphs, saying “there was a longing for change, a yearning for change.”
Liberals lost seats in just about every region of the country – especially their fortresses in Toronto and Montreal.
Some of Harper’s gains came at the expense of vote splitting, and huge gains in Ontario and the Toronto Area after years of courting voters.
Harper ran a tight, scripted campaign, taking credit for Canada’s recovery during the worldwide recession and portrayed himself as the only leader who could keep the fragile economy from cracking.
He warned how Layton, Ignatieff and Duceppe would cripple the recovery if they were allowed to overtake his minority government.
Ignatieff, by all accounts, outperformed expectations on a personal level, but the sponsorship-tainted Liberal brand weighed his campaign down as voters looked to Harper for stability and Layton for change.
It was the Liberals who triggered the election, accusing Harper and crew of being unethical and corrupt. They forced a confidence vote in the House of Commons where the Conservatives were found in contempt of Parliament.
But it seemed, as the election trudged on, Ignatieff was having difficulty recovering from devastating Conservative attack ads that framed him as a power-hungry, visiting Harvard professor.
Layton, meanwhile, ran a solid campaign and played to the public mood of change.
He repeated that Ottawa was a messed-up place that needed fixing and he should be given the chance to make Parliament work. His populist policies of cutting hospital waiting times, slashing credit card interest rates and going after cell phone giants for gouging consumers appealed to many.