LIBERALS WIN ANOTHER MINORITY

Trudeau unable to capture coveted majority after calling snap election during pandemic; O’Toole’s future as Conservative Leader is cast into doubt

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a third straight election on Monday, but fell short of the majority he sought in the snap vote and will return to government with what will effectively be a status quo Parliament.

The Liberal victory left Erin O’Toole’s leadership of the Conservative Party in jeopardy. The Tory leader rose to the helm of the party last year promising to deliver in seat-rich Ontario but he struggled in the campaign with questions on how he would handle the pandemic and wavered on a number of key platform pledges.

Early Tuesday morning, the Liberals were leading or elected in 157 seats, the Conservatives were at 120, the Bloc Québécois at 32 and the NDP at 27. The Green Party was at two seats.

Mr. Trudeau though will face tough questions after triggering the election two years early. The $610-million vote so closely mirrored the 2019 election that it also saw the Conservatives surpass the Grits in the popular vote, with 34 per cent to the Liberals’ 32 per cent in initial results. Elections Canada will only start counting the nearly one million mail-in ballots it received on Tuesday.

The 36-day campaign, the shortest period allowed by law, was launched in the dead of summer and was dominated by the crisis in Afghanistan, growing COVID-19 case counts and divisiveness on the campaign trail. The election presented challenges for Elections Canada to pull off in the middle of a pandemic. Long lineups snaked outside polling stations after polls closed in some ridings and the agency warned before the election that some final counts may take days to deliver.

The NDP appeared to be on the cusp of increasing its tally by a handful of seats but it was unclear if it was enough to replace the Bloc Québécois for third-party status in the House of Commons. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet slipped slightly in the initial seat count.

Green Party Leader Annamie Paul lost her bid for Toronto Centre in a third straight election, placing a distant fourth in initial results.

People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier also lost in his attempt to return to the House of Commons and his far-right party won no seats.

Two Liberal cabinet ministers also lost their seats on Monday: Bernadette Jordan in Nova Scotia, and Maryam Monsef in Peterborough, Ont.

Former NDP MP Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, who lost her Quebec seat in 2019, appeared poised to win late Monday, handing the party a second seat in the province. For the first time in the Green Party’s history, the party picked up a seat in Ontario, but in a bittersweet twist failed to win back the seat lost in New Brunswick where their MP defected to the Liberals.

The Liberals gambled on an early election because they believed they were positioned to win a majority – the Conservatives were low in the polls and doubts persisted about whether Mr. O’Toole could mount a strong national campaign. But voters were unwilling to give the Liberal Leader the decisive victory he sought.

Mr. Trudeau and Mr. O’Toole were unable to break past the credibility questions that dogged them during the campaign. For the Liberal Leader it was why he called the election midway through his mandate and for Mr. O’Toole it was the lack of transparency on his own team’s COVID-19 vaccinations in the middle of a pandemic. Despite Mr. Trudeau’s and Mr. O’Toole’s struggle to swing momentum their way, none of the smaller parties were able to capitalize on the lackluster response to the Liberals and Conservatives.

Even before the polls closed on Monday, the Conservatives made a last-ditch effort to lower expectations for the election result, declaring that holding the Liberals to a minority would be a victory for the party. The comments were meant to salvage Mr. O’Toole’s tenure after he campaigned to the right in the leadership race last year only to move the party to the centre during the campaign.

The move to trigger an election in August was immediately criticized by opposition parties, who accused the Liberal Leader of a “power grab” and a “selfish” decision in the middle of a health crisis and after Mr. Trudeau had just months earlier ruled out a pandemic election.

The election started as a fourth wave of the virus began to take off. Mr. Trudeau said the vote was necessary because the pandemic had not existed in 2019 during the last campaign, and Canadians should have a choice about who should lead them out of the health crisis.

Mr. Trudeau struggled at times to explain why he needed a mandate from Canadians to move forward on measures such as $10-aday child care, when his government had already signed agreements with eight provinces before the campaign, and most of the measures he’s proposed in the election already had the support from the Bloc or the NDP. And while he portrayed Parliament as toxic before the election, the New Democrats had been broadly supporting the Liberals’ pandemic initiatives.

His primary target in the race was Mr. O’Toole, portraying the rookie Conservative Leader as a Stephen Harper carbon copy who is beholden to anti-vaxxers, prolifers and the gun lobby.

He also tried to tie Mr. O’Toole to the rising COVID-19 cases in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In the final days of the campaign, Mr. Trudeau focused on climate change and appealed to progressives to support his party in order to stop a Conservative win.

The Conservatives framed the campaign as a referendum on Mr. Trudeau’s leadership, urging voters not to “reward” the Liberals for calling the election two years early during a health crisis. Mr. O’Toole, who pitched himself as a “True Blue” Conservative during the 2020 leadership race, took a more moderate approach during the campaign, proposing heavy deficit spending, a carbon price, and frequently labelling himself as pro-choice and an ally to the LGBTQ community.

Mr. O’Toole cast himself as the “the man with the plan” to recover the Canadian economy and chart a course out of the pandemic. But throughout the race, Mr. O’Toole faced repeated questions about elements of his party platform, primarily on issues such as conscience rights for physicians and gun control.

The Liberals also took aim at Mr. O’Toole throughout the race for his position on mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations. Perhaps the most bruising attack on Mr. O’Toole was directed at his leadership: The Conservative Leader would not make vaccines mandatory for his own caucus, and wouldn’t reveal how many of his candidates were unvaccinated.

The New Democrats had focused their campaign on progressive promises such as taxing the wealthy, Indigenous reconciliation and affordable housing, with Mr. Singh taking aim at Mr. Trudeau for what he called a trail of broken promises to left-leaning voters. The New Democrats put a bigger spotlight on Indigenous issues than other parties, with the leader visiting First Nations communities during the campaign, highlighting the trauma of residential schools and ongoing boilwater advisories.

Mr. Singh sought to harness his social-media popularity at the polls, using platform such as TikTok and Twitch, a livestreaming service, as well as the video game Animal Crossing. But the NDP Leader struggled at times during the campaign to explain how his government would carry out complex promises such as ending all boil-water advisories in Canada, beyond expressing the political will to do so.

The Liberals were planning to chart their path to a majority through Quebec where the Bloc Québécois are their main competition. Mr. Blanchet struggled to gain traction in the first weeks but was able to turn his campaign around based solely on one question in the English-language leaders’ debate. At the beginning of the debate, Mr. Blanchet was asked to explain his support for “discriminatory” secularism and language laws in Quebec. The question’s framing angered voters in Quebec who viewed it as an unwarranted attack from English Canada, Mr. Blanchet seized on the issue and positioned himself and his party as defenders of Quebec in Ottawa.

The issue became so corrosive in Quebec that all the other party leaders were also forced to condemn the question and Mr. Trudeau, Mr. O’Toole and Mr. Singh called on the Debate Broadcast Group to apologize for the question.

The Green Party was consumed with internal strife heading into the campaign, leaving Leader Annamie Paul with little institutional and economic support. The rookie leader, the first Black woman leader of a federal political party in Canada, stayed mostly in Toronto Centre (a Liberal stronghold that most people viewed as a long shot for her).

Mr. Bernier’s People’s Party emerged as the wild card in the race. The anti-establishment, anti-vaccination, far-right party was the election disrupter, with Mr. Bernier holding large rallies and many of his supporters protesting Mr. Trudeau’s events. One PPC official was charged for allegedly throwing gravel at the Liberal Leader during a campaign stop in London, Ont.

Long lines bogged down voters at some polling stations, in some cases for hours, and Elections Canada reported a shortage of staff at some polls in Toronto. Even before Monday’s vote, the agency had warned voters to brace for challenges and delays because of fewer polling stations, fewer election workers and more public-health protocols.

Mr. Trudeau said the vote was necessary because the pandemic had not existed in 2019 during the last campaign, and Canadians should have a choice about who should lead them out of the health crisis.