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)
