Ottawa: The ruling Liberal Party of Canada has been projected as the winner in the elections by the Canada Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as the early results showed a strong lead for the party.
CBC News said that it “is projecting the Liberals will form its fourth consecutive government” but said it was “too soon” to say if it would get a majority on its own or form a minority government.
The Liberal Party had captured 33 of the 65 seats for which the results were announced by 10:30 pm local time here on Monday (8 am Tuesday in India) as the counting continued for the remaining 273 seats. In te 33-member House of Commons.
The Liberal Party was leading in 117 seats, while the Conservative Party had won 32 seats and was leading in 83 others.
The New Democratic Party led by Jagmeet Singh, allegedly a Khalistan sympathiser, had not won a single seat but was leading in five.
In the aggregation of polls before Monday, the Liberal Party was ahead of the Conservative Party by just under 3 per cent, according to the government-funded Canada Broadcasting Corporation.
However, it projected the Liberals to win a commanding lead in the number of seats and form the government.
If the Liberal Party wins, Mark Carney, who replaced Justin Trudeau, will continue as prime minister. He was leading in the Nepean constituency in Ontario Province.
The Conservative Party led by Pierre Poilievre rode high because of Trudeaus’s unpopularity and polls showed the party heading for a landslide win.
But ironically, US President Donald Trump breathed new life into the Liberal Party when he declared a tariff war on Canada and threatened to annex it.
Because Poilievre is ideologically close to Trump, more Canadians rallied to the Liberals, which offered a nationalist opposition to the US president.
Canada uses paper ballots, and the counting is decentralised with tallies made at the polling stations and communicated to Election Canada, the authority running the polling. This helps get the results out early.
(IANS)
