Canadians started voting yesterday in an election expected to drive the scandal-smeared Liberal Party from power after 12 years, and nudge the country to the right with a new Conservative-led government.

 

Stephen Harper, the 46-year-old Conservative leader, is pledging to cleanse government in Ottawa and mend strained relations with the US.

 

But Prime Minister Paul Martin, 67, desperate for a miraculous comeback to confound polls in which he trails badly, has branded Harper an "extremist" closer to US arch conservatives than socially moderate Canadians.

 

Voting for 23 million eligible Canadians began in easternmost Atlantic coast districts in Newfoundland and Labrador and will end 15 hours and six time zones later (at 0300 GMT today) on the Pacific seaboard.

 

After seven weeks of jarring rhetoric, party leaders crisscrossed the vast country on Sunday to close the campaign held unusually in Canada's savage winter after the Liberal-led minority government folded in November.

 

Harper, a former academic who smoothed a once abrasive image and tracked to the center in a tightly disciplined campaign, basked in opinion polls that gave him a 10-point lead over Martin enough for a minority government.

 

"We can win because it is time for a change, time to move forward, time to get beyond the scandals and investigations and corruption," he told cheering supporters in the frigid central city of Winnipeg on Sunday.

 

But Martin, a millionaire ex-shipping tycoon, hoped voters would undergo a polling booth conversion, and balk at entrusting the Conservatives with power.

 

"We will win!" he promised cheering supporters at a rally in Richmond, a suburb of the western city of Vancouver.

 

The final poll of the campaign by Strategic Counsel for CTV television and the Globe and Mail newspaper Sunday night gave the Conservatives 37 percent of the likely vote, and the Liberals 27 percent.

 

Those figures would translate into a solid Harper victory, but force him to piece together a minority government with help from the separatist Bloc Quebecois or the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP).

 

New Democrats had 19 percent in the CTV poll, with significant gains in British Columbia on the west coast, and in Toronto, Canada's economic hub.

 

The Bloc, which only fields candidates in the mainly French-speaking province of Quebec, was at 11 percent.

 

The Montreal newspaper La Presse carried an Ekos survey that predicted the Conservatives would win 120 to 130 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons.

 

(China Daily January 24, 2006)