CANADA/ ELECTIONS: When a group of long-serving Canadian diplomats and public servants gathered in the fashionable Ottawa suburb of Rockcliffe Park on Monday evening to watch the election results the mood was gloomy, writes Conor O'Clery in Ottawa
Most were Liberal Party supporters, and polls were predicting that the Conservatives would benefit from Liberal Party woes and win enough seats to put together a tax-cutting, pro-American government. By the time the guests left around midnight they had cheered up considerably.
Liberal Party electors in key constituencies around the country had "held their nose" rather than vote Conservative, and had grudgingly given the ruling party enough seats to stay in power as a minority government.
As the last votes were tallied in Canada's 308 ridings yesterday, the Liberals had won 135 seats, the Conservative Party 99, Bloc Quebecois 54, National Democratic Party (NDP) 19 and Independents one. After an 11-year monopoly of power, the Liberal party lost 33 seats but confounded pollsters by not ceding many more to the Conservatives.
Outgoing Liberal Prime Minister Mr Paul Martin now has a long, leisurely summer to reshuffle his cabinet and work out a legislative agenda with the left-leaning NDP before parliament reconvenes.
"This is the first minority government in a generation, we will make it work," said Mr Martin, who replaced Mr Jean Chretien in December, but "as a party and a government we must do better." The big winner in the election was the Bloc Quebecois, which took 54 of Quebec's 75 seats - including Mr Chretien's - and whose ultimate goal is separation.
"Quebec forms a nation, we deserve our own country, equal to all other countries," Bloc Quebecois leader Mr Gilles Duceppe told cheering supporters in Montreal, in French, while emphasising in English that his MPs would act responsibly in the federal parliament in Ottawa.
Six months ago the Bloc was written off but rebounded after a Liberal Party scandal which caused a furore throughout Canada and offended Quebecers in particular. It involved the payment of millions of federal dollars to fly the Canadian flag in Quebec to discourage separatism, much of which ended up instead in Liberal Party coffers.
The result was a bitter blow for the new Conservative Party led by Mr Stephen Harper, who had merged the right-wing Alliance of western Canada and the Progressive Conservatives of the east coast last year to end long-standing divisions on the right. It made large gains but failed to make a predicted breakthrough in Ontario, where a third of Canadians live, and thereby take enough seats to form a minority government with the Bloc Quebecois.
Polls showed Toronto voters were outraged by the financial scandal and Liberal arrogance, but many were apparently put off by 45-year-old Mr Harper's inexperience and some Conservative missteps. These included a comment by a prominent candidate that the party could invoke the rarely-used "notwithstanding' clause in Canada's Charter, which allows a majority to pass a law notwithstanding the Charter, and could well have been used by a Conservative-led government to reverse abortion rights and gay marriage.
The Conservative Party also outraged many voters with a press release suggesting Mr Martin condoned child pornography. Adding to the indignity, Mr Harper's campaign bus was mooned by an entire women's soccer team outside Fredericton as his campaign faltered. Canadian politics now returns to the situation in 1972 when Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau had to negotiate bill by bill with the New Democratic Party to stay in power.
An ebullient NDP leader, Mr Jack Layton, said the price of keeping the Liberals in office would include rebuilding health care, also a pledge by Mr Martin, introducing PR in elections and ending co-operation with the US on anti-missile space programmes. Canada's new government will inevitably be more left-leaning than previous Liberal governments.