Justin Trudeau Elected Prime Minister of Canada Canadians vote to unseat Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Liberal Party wins a majority of Parliament’s 338 seats By Paul Vieira
http://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-networks-project-liberal-party-victory-1445306893
Justin Trudeau’s centrist Liberal Party was headed for a majority government, with his party leading in or elected in most districts across the country, after a hard-fought contest with incumbent Stephen Harper. Mr. Harper said last night that he would step down as party leader, after conceding to Mr. Trudeau.
Results from polls in the country’s most-populated regions, Quebec and Ontario, and from Canada’s Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Coast city of Vancouver, showed a wave of Liberal red, marking an impressive victory in Mr. Trudeau’s first campaign as leader. The win represents the first Liberal majority in 15 years. The Conservatives maintained their bedrock support in the resource-rich western provinces, as well as in the bulk of rural Canada.
Mr. Harper’s claim to economic stewardship was tarnished by a recent commodities-driven economic slump severe enough to lead the economy of the U.S.’s biggest trading partner to contract in the first half of this year.
Amid the faltering economy and a string of controversies surrounding the Conservatives, Mr. Trudeau’s newcomer status may have played into a deep-seated desire for change. Polls found 70% of voters said they were tired of Conservative rule in surveys near the end of the campaign.
Early in the campaign, which was launched in August by the Conservatives, the Liberals appeared to have little chance, and the left-leaning New Democratic Party surged ahead.
The Conservatives then moved into the lead, and only in the last couple of weeks of the 11-week campaign did the Liberals move into and hold first place in national polls.
In a speech at a Montreal hotel Monday night, Mr. Trudeau promised to lead an inclusive government that would support the middle class and draw strength from the country’s diversity.
“Canadians have spoken,” Mr. Trudeau told a crowd of supporters. “You want a government with a vision and an agenda for this country that is positive and ambitious and hopeful. My friends, I promise you tonight that I will be that government.”
At Conservative headquarters in Calgary, Mr. Harper conceded defeat and said that while disappointed with the outcome he had no regrets. “We gave everything we had to give, and we have no regrets whatsoever,” Mr. Harper said. “Canadians have elected a Liberal government, a result I accept without hesitation.”
He didn’t tell supporters of his decision to step down as party leader. That news emerged in a statement issued by the Conservative Party around the same time he spoke.
The transition before Mr. Trudeau officially assumes office could take a few weeks.
ENLARGE Mr. Harper’s campaign for a fourth term faltered, his former aides and political analysts say, because it lacked a big idea despite having the deepest war chest and being well organized.
“There was nothing warm and fuzzy to win over voters,” said Keith Beardsley, a former senior aide to Mr. Harper between 2006 and 2008. “There was no big ticket item to win over hearts other than balancing the budget. He ran out of gas.”
Mr. Trudeau will become the leader of a Group of Seven country without having held an executive job or a cabinet post. He faces the task of injecting confidence into the economy, which he plans to tackle by loosening the country’s fiscal purse strings. He has said he would run budget deficits for at least three years to finance 60 billion Canadian dollars (US$46 billion) in infrastructure spending.
That approach is in contrast to the one taken by the Harper government. Even as the economy contracted in the first half of the year and business investment dropped sharply, largely because of the pullback in the oil patch, Mr. Harper moved ahead with his plan to balance the federal budget and run a surplus. Some economists criticized his insistence on sticking to that plan, especially as the Bank of Canada moved twice this year to cut rates in an effort to stimulate the economy.
Mr. Harper was widely credited with helping Canada emerge relatively unscathed and in better shape than its G-7 peers from the global financial crisis and recession, in part by launching an aggressive stimulus program to mitigate the fallout.
His economic stewardship helped him win a majority government in 2011 after years as a minority leader. He slowly and surely put his ideological stamp on the country, pushing for smaller government and becoming an outspoken voice on foreign affairs, including by backing the U.S.’s combat mission against Islamic State.
Mr. Trudeau faces the task of proving himself on the world stage and is equipped with little experience of foreign affairs at a time when global tensions are escalating, said Derek Burney, who served as Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. under Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1990s.
“This is not his father’s world,” Mr. Burney said. “We are going through a period in the world where the U.S. is pushing back, the Russians are thrashing around and the Chinese are trying to assert themselves…we have to be very prudent.”
Pierre Trudeau, one of the longest-serving prime ministers in Canadian history, cemented his place as one of the architects of modern-day Canada through the hard-fought introduction in the early 1980s of a constitution and a charter of rights and freedoms.
ENLARGE His son has said one of his “most crucial” jobs would be to rebuild U.S.-Canada relations, which he said were marred by Mr. Harper’s single-minded focus on obtaining approval for the Keystone XL pipeline.
Under Mr. Trudeau, Canada’s staunch support for some U.S. military initiatives could weaken. Canada joined the U.S.-led military action against Islamic State a year ago, but the Liberal Party says it will put an end to Canada’s combat mission against the militant group, and instead refocus Canada’s military role in the region on training local forces to fight the insurgents.
The election is likely to elicit a muted response from Toronto’s Bay Street, as the country’s financial sector is known, because of the similarities between the election platforms of the three main parties, said Ian Russell, chief executive of Investment Industry Association of Canada, the umbrella group for the brokerage sector.
The Conservatives and Liberals each promised to keep the federal corporate tax rate at 15%. The Liberals’ commitment to running three years of annual deficits of up to C$10 billion is within the range of those the government generated following the financial crisis.
“The magnitude is small relative to the overall debt of the country,” Mr. Russell said. “But I think there will be a heightened sensitivity to watching carefully, particularly a new government” over the next six months to a year, he said.
Friends of Mr. Trudeau from his time growing up in Montreal suggest Mr. Trudeau recognizes the challenge in front of him.
“He’s well practiced and well versed in being the son of an iconic prime minister,” said Terry DiMonte, a host at Montreal’s CHOM radio station, who has known Mr. Trudeau for more than two decades.
Mr. Trudeau proved his political chops, friends and analysts say, when he first ran as a Liberal candidate for the country’s parliament in 2008. He chose to run in an ethnically diverse part of Montreal, where support for the independence movement is strong, instead of the city’s west end that is safe Liberal Party territory and which his father represented.
Part of the reason was to debunk his critics, who claimed he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had everything handed to him. He won election to Parliament in 2008, and was re-elected in 2011 and again on Monday.
Mr. Trudeau grew up in the spotlight, with photos of his father toting him around like a football or of them attending Montreal Expos games. He and his two siblings were raised at the prime minister’s official residence in Ottawa, 24 Sussex, up until 1984.
Patrick Gossage, a press secretary for Pierre Trudeau, recalled the time former U.S. President Ronald Reagan visited 24 Sussex in 1981 and Justin and his brothers were playing in the living room. Mr. Reagan met all three sons, “but Justin was the most formal. He shook his hand,” Mr. Gossage said.
Mr. Trudeau attracted national attention for the eulogy he delivered for his father in 2000, which was televised nationally and stoked talk of a political career.
In 2005, Mr. Trudeau married Sophie Grégoire, at the time a TV and radio host in French-speaking Quebec, and the couple have three children, ranging in age from 20 months to 7 years old.
Much like his father, Mr. Trudeau engages in sports including canoeing and boxing. Mr. Gossage said Pierre Trudeau would often spar with his son, and that was where Justin Trudeau initially learned to box.
Mr. Trudeau scored a knockout against a former Conservative senator in a charity match back in 2012. Before the fight, Mr. Trudeau was billed as the underdog against his Tory foe—just as he was in the buildup to the 2015 election.
—Kim Mackrael in Montreal and Chester Dawson in Calgary contributed to this article.
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