Election Day is officially under way in Canada, as voters choose the country’s next parliament after a short campaign that saw Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in a neck-and-neck fight against the opposition Conservative Party.
The first polls opened in Newfoundland, on Canada’s east coast, at 8:30am local time (11:00 GMT) on Monday. More than 27 million people are eligible to cast their ballots, according to Elections Canada, which administers the vote.
A day earlier, Trudeau and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole made their final pitches to Canadians.
“Canada is at a crossroads. We now get to pick the right direction for our country, to keep moving forward – or to let Conservatives take us back,” Trudeau said during a rally in Montreal, where he is seeking re-election in the Papineau riding.
Speaking to Conservative Party volunteers on Sunday in Markham, Ontario, just north of Toronto, O’Toole hit back at Trudeau, accusing the Liberal leader of calling “a $600m election rather than focus on the health of people”.
“So tomorrow we can vote for better, tomorrow we can make sure that we do not reward Mr Trudeau for a $600m election,” O’Toole said.
The Canadian election campaign has been dominated by concerns over COVID-19 and mandatory vaccines, investments in health and child care, economic recovery plans and housing, among other key issues.
Trudeau triggered the vote in mid-August, two years ahead of schedule. While experts said the Liberal leader called the election in hopes his government’s handling of the coronavirus would give the party a majority, Trudeau has faced angry protests along the campaign trail and many voters have criticised him for calling the vote during a fourth wave of the pandemic.
Trudeau has been prime minister since 2015, but the Liberals lost their majority in the last federal election in 2019.
The party was polling at 31.4 percent support as of Sunday, according to CBC News’s Poll Tracker, which aggregates all public polling data, compared with 30.9 percent for the Conservatives and 20 percent for the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) in third place.
But neither the Liberals nor Conservatives are expected to get the 170 seats needed to secure a majority government.
The Liberals are projected to win the most seats in parliament, CBC said, and the party has a three in five chance of getting another minority government. EKOS Politics also predicted late on Sunday that the Liberals would win a minority, “though it is unclear whether this will be a strengthened or diminished minority”.
While the Conservatives “stumbled” in the later stages of the campaign, EKOS said the Liberals “have been edging steadily upward over the past few days, particularly in Ontario”, the country’s most populous province.
But Daniel Beland, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that even if the Liberals appear to have a seat advantage, “it could still go either way”.
“They [Liberals and Conservatives] are really neck and neck,” he said, adding that a strong showing by the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois or the far-right People’s Party of Canada could affect the outcome in key ridings where the Liberals and Conservatives are in close races.
“There are a lot of different scenarios,” Beland said in an interview. “It will be, I think, a long night and it’s hard to make a projection.”
He also said that if Trudeau’s election gamble does not pay off – and the Liberals do not get at least a minority government – “it will be very, very hard” for him to stay on as party leader. O’Toole faces the same prospect, Beland added, if the Conservatives do not improve on their 2019 showing.
In 2019, the Liberals won 157 seats compared with 121 for the Conservatives. The Bloc Quebecois finished with the third-most seats at 32; the NDP had 24 seats; the Greens won three seats and the last seat was won by an independent.
Meanwhile, the official vote results may not be released on Monday night, Canadian media have reported, as election officials will need to count mail-in ballots.
Elections Canada says that, based on expected volumes, they will be able to start counting mail ballots on Tuesday and have the vast majority of ridings completed by Wednesday, with some potentially still taking the rest of the week to complete.
— Éric Grenier (@EricGrenierTW) September 19, 2021