Politics

Canada's Liberals lose their majority

OTTAWA - The Liberal Party lost its outright control of Parliament on Monday but easily won the largest share of seats and will now try to lead Canada's first minority government in 25 years.

Though dogged by scandal and pressed by a newly unified Conservative Party, the Liberals prevailed by largely holding their ground in Ontario, the most populous province. Projections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. suggested the Liberals might win roughly 140 seats overall, short of the 155 need to singlehandedly control the House of Commons, but far more than 90 to 100 seats the Conservatives were projected to win.

In Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois, which advocates independence for the Francophone province, did well at the Liberals' expense. The Bloc increased its share of Quebec's 75 seats from 33 to more than 50.

Whatever parliamentary government emerges is likely to be an unsteady one, requiring another election in the year ahead, according to a range of political scientists.

Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, 65, was hobbled by a series of scandals that produced a strong popular backlash. Through much of the campaign, he appeared tired and unfocused.

Just before he set the election date last month, he visited President Bush at the White House and declared his intention to work more closely with Washington. But when he returned home, he implicitly criticized the United States by suggesting that Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper would make Canada more like its southern neighbor, with lower taxes and inadequate health care for the poor.

In the end, Martin settled on the theme that the Liberals were the natural defenders of "Canadian values," like publicly financed health insurance and support for the Kyoto climate control accord. He pledged to install a nationwide child day care program.

"We really think this is the time for all progressives to come together," Martin told reporters at a campaign stop in Nova Scotia on Sunday, in a pitch to win back voters from the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois.

Harper, a 45-year-old former economics graduate student who has been representing Calgary, set up his run by skillfully uniting the Canadian Alliance Party with the more centrist Progressive Conservative Party last October to form the new Conservative Party, and then running a moderate campaign.

While he pledged to abandon gun registry regulations, which are unpopular in the West, to cut income taxes and to return more control to provincial governments, he managed to steer clear of pronouncing controversial views on gay rights and abortion.

Instead, he tried to ride a wave of dissatisfaction with the Liberals. "We are going to change the system, we are going to make things better, we are going to clean up the mess," Harper told a rally in Edmonton on Sunday.

The defining point of contention for many voters was a scandal involving the government's disbursement of about $75-million to Quebec advertising firms friendly to the Liberal Party as part of an antiseparatist campaign. The country's auditor general released a report soon after Martin took power saying that the firms had done little or nothing for the money, and the opposition said it was all a kickback scheme to line the Liberals' campaign war chest.

Martin insisted that he knew nothing of the payoffs, even though he was finance minister at the time, and that he intended to re-engineer Liberal rule to make it more accountable and democratic. But he called the election before a final investigation could be completed, provoking a good deal of popular cynicism, especially in his home province of Quebec, and the Bloc Quebecois has surged as a protest vehicle.

"The Liberals said we'll investigate this after we are re-elected, and nobody would buy that," said Pierre Martin, a political scientist at the University of Montreal.

"Outside Quebec, the scandal was all about pandering to Quebeckers and wasting money on Quebec," said Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill University Institute for the Study of Canada. "And inside Quebec, it confirmed to Quebeckers that the Liberal Party was corrupt and trying to buy Quebeckers."

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