MONTREAL — Canadian voters head to the polls Monday to cast ballots in the snap federal election called by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month.
He bet that positive appraisals of his covid-19 response and the apparent vulnerabilities of his main foe would turn his minority government into a majority — but that result could elude him.
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As the 36-day campaign drew to a close, polls showed a close race between Trudeau’s Liberals and Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives. The Liberals held an edge in the seat count, but much hinged on voter turnout and the fortunes of smaller parties that could play spoiler.
The vote caps a campaign that many here felt was unnecessary, failed to inspire much enthusiasm and featured ugly scenes of protesters — many of them opposed to vaccines and vaccine mandates — screaming vulgarities at Trudeau and his family and at one point pelting him with gravel.
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The campaign, wrote a Toronto Star columnist, “has essentially been a bad mood looking for a place to land.” A Globe and Mail writer described it as a “mean, shallow, silly, pointless affair.”
Trudeau, 49, came to power in 2015 with promises of “real change,” casting himself as a feminist climate warrior and champion of liberal values. He has since been buffeted by scandals, including revelations that he wore blackface makeup as a younger man. His government was reduced to a minority in 2019.
Trudeau rolled the dice on a snap election. Canadian voters will decide whether his gamble pays off.
But even with six years of baggage and broken promises under his belt, the race wasn’t expected to be close.
Polls on the eve of the election call last month put Trudeau comfortably ahead of O’Toole, 48, who had struggled to make an impression with voters since taking over the Conservative Party leadership last year.
But Trudeau misjudged the public appetite for a vote and ran a lackluster campaign. His rivals criticized him for calling an election during Canada’s fourth pandemic wave — at a campaign stop in Ontario last week, O’Toole called the decision “vain, risky and selfish.” Trudeau has failed to articulate why an election needed to happen now.
O’Toole, meanwhile, ran a campaign that exceeded expectations, particularly in the early weeks. His moderate platform targets working-class voters, features a version of a price on carbon and mostly shuns social conservative views to build a “big blue tent.”
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“We’re not your dad’s Conservative Party anymore,” the former military helicopter navigator said at a campaign event in Quebec last week.
But in moving to the middle, O’Toole has disavowed many of the pledges, including on climate and guns, that he made last year to secure the Conservative Party leadership. Back then, he branded himself a “true blue” Conservative who’d “take back Canada.” His election campaign pivot now risks alienating his base and has given his foes ammunition to argue that he’ll say anything to get elected.
Erin O’Toole, once called a ‘dud’ by fellow Conservatives, pulls into a tight race with Canada’s Trudeau
The Liberals have turned to several traditional wedge issues, including gun control and abortion rights, to try to gain an edge. They’ve also sought to leverage their support for mandatory vaccinations for federal civil servants and plane and train passengers, both of which poll well here. O’Toole supports vaccines but says he won’t mandate them.
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In the final days of the campaign, Trudeau has tried to make the vote a referendum on his management of the pandemic. He has attacked O’Toole for last year endorsing the pandemic response of Jason Kenney, Alberta’s United Conservative Party premier.
Kenney, a former federal cabinet minister, declared his western province “open for good” earlier this year. Now, amid a coronavirus wave that has overwhelmed Alberta’s health-care system, he has reversed course, announcing new restrictions last week and a vaccine passport system.
“The choices that leaders make in a crisis matter,” Trudeau said in Montreal last week. “Half-measures won’t do to fight this pandemic.”
The election will turn on familiar battlegrounds: the suburbs outside Toronto and Vancouver and the French-speaking province of Quebec.
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Much could also hinge on the fortunes of other parties. The left-leaning New Democratic Party could split the progressive vote, and the insurgent right-wing People’s Party of Canada could do the same for the conservative vote. A wild card is the separatist Bloc Québécois, which got a much-needed boost in a leaders debate.
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During the debate, the moderator challenged Bloc leader Yves-Fran？ois Blanchet over his support for the “discriminatory” Bill 21, a controversial provincial law that bars some public-sector workers from wearing religious symbols such as hijabs or yarmulkes at work in the name of secularism.
“Those laws are not about discrimination,” Blanchet said. “They are about the values of Quebec.”
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The question touched off a firestorm in the province, which is home to nearly a quarter of the seats up for grabs. Premier Fran？ois Legault called the question “unacceptable.” The major federal party leaders called on the independent consortium that organized the debates to apologize.
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Canadians don’t vote directly for prime minister. Voters in each of the country’s 338 electoral districts vote for a local candidate to represent them in the House of Commons. If one party gains a majority — 170 seats or more — its leader becomes prime minister.
If, as was expected Monday, no party reaches a majority, the incumbent prime minister gets the first shot at forming a new government but must rely on opposition party support to stay in power.
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Federal election authorities said a record 5.78 million Canadians voted early, up more than 18 percent from 2019. Some 1.2 million Canadians voted by special ballot, a category that includes voting by mail, setting a record. Mail-in ballots won’t be counted until the day after the election, which could delay some results for several days.
The pandemic has created challenges for Elections Canada, which has had difficulty finding suitable polling locations and hiring enough workers. Spokeswoman Natasha Gauthier said that as of Sept. 16, the agency was short 28,000 workers.
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