Atlantic Canada gives Liberals early boost as polls close on east coast

Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau (Facebook photo)

OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau’s Liberals got an early boost from voters in Atlantic Canada as polls closed across the country’s easternmost time zones Monday, signalling the beginning of the end for the longest election in modern Canadian history.

The campaign, which began on a sweltering August long weekend, ended under a threat of October frost.

With staggered voting hours, the polls in Newfoundland and Labrador were the first to close, and — as expected — Liberals were elected or leading all seven of the province’s seats — with only incumbent New Democrat Jack Harris, hanging on by his fingernails, offering any hope of preventing a Liberal sweep.

The red Liberal tide was also spreading into Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I. in the early going, with Liberals pulling in two out of every three votes counted in the early going and New Democrats and Conservatives splitting the rest.

The governing Conservatives held 13 of Atlantic Canada’s 32 seats and the NDP held six when the election was called but Liberals were leading in 30 of the region’s ridings in early vote counting.

For the 2015 election, there is no longer a blackout on transmitting voting results while polls are still open in other parts of the country — a ban that had become impossible to enforce in the age of the Internet.

While ballot counting starts in one end of the country, exhausted party workers in other provinces are still getting out their vote in what has been shaping up as an epic battle that’s as much about gut-level values as election platforms.

The hope is that by the end of the night, many questions will be answered.

Will the Liberals become the first third-place party in federal history to leap straight into government in a single election? Is Canada ready for another Trudeau as prime minister?

Or can Stephen Harper become the first prime minister since Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1908 to win four consecutive mandates? And if he doesn’t win another majority — meaning 170 seats in the newly expanded House of Commons — will he survive as Conservative party leader?

Can NDP Leader Tom Mulcair miraculously lift the New Democrats to their first national government in Canada’s history? Can the party maintain its hard-won 2011 grip on official Opposition status?

Harper and wife Laureen appeared in good spirits as they arrived in the new riding of Calgary Heritage to cast ballots.

“It’s a nice blue sky,” said the Conservative leader. “That’s how I’m feeling.”

With his wife Sophie and children in tow, Trudeau marked a ballot at a polling station in an Italian-Canadian cultural centre in his Montreal riding of Papineau.

When Parliament was dissolved for the election on Aug. 2, the Conservatives held 159 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons, the NDP had 95 and the Liberals 36, with another 18 seats either vacant, held by Independents or shared between the Green party (two seats) and the Bloc Quebecois and a splinter group.

Due to population growth, 30 new seats have been added this election, including 15 in Ontario, six each for Alberta and British Columbia and three more for Quebec.

But the new ridings mean most old riding boundaries also had to be redrawn, literally reconfiguring the electoral map and making seat projections all the more difficult. Combine that with some spectacular polling embarrassments in recent provincial elections and today’s outcome remains very much up in the air.

“There’s a whole pile of new (riding) configurations, 30 new seats,” pollster Frank Graves of Ekos Research said as the campaign wound down.

“There’s some complex vote-splitting that we don’t know how it will work in those new ridings. We certainly don’t know who’s going to turn out to vote. That’s always critical.”

Some 3.6 million Canadians cast ballots during the four-day advance polling period on the Thanksgiving long weekend — an increase of 71 per cent over the 2011 election, when only three days of advance polls were held.

Whether that increased voter turnout carries into the main event is another question that will be answered today.

Just 61.4 per cent of eligible electors cast a ballot in 2011, up marginally from the 58.8 per cent in 2008 — the lowest ever in a federal election.

The Elections Canada website was briefly unavailable early today due to a high volume of web traffic.

Some polling stations in the hotly contested riding of Winnipeg Centre opened up to an hour late because Elections Canada workers cancelled at the last minute.

The agency wouldn’t say exactly how many people didn’t show up as promised but said it was more than a dozen.

Overall though, there appeared to be only scattered voting glitches.

“There are sporadic accounts of longer lines, but that’s normal, especially during peak times,” said Elections Canada spokeswoman Natalie Babin Dufresne.

There were reports of voters with face coverings — including skeleton masks and even a pumpkin — at polling stations, an apparent reaction to the controversy over whether women should be permitted to wear a niqab at citizenship ceremonies.

A face covering is permitted at the polls if the voter swears an oath attesting to their status as an elector and shows the required identification, said Babin Dufresne.

Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde — who initially said he wouldn’t vote in order to maintain his neutrality, then changed his mind — tweeted about his trip to the polls.

The Bloc’s Gilles Duceppe cast his ballot and said he was happy with the reaction he received from voters who welcomed him back after a hiatus from the party leadership. “There’s always a phrase that stands out in a campaign and this time it was, ‘Thank you for coming back’ from beginning to end.”

Green Leader Elizabeth May, who voted in Sidney, B.C., took a polling-station selfie photo with her daughter and tweeted her prediction of a record high voter turnout. She planned to be in Victoria with fellow candidates to watch the results roll in.

Mulcair, who voted in an advance poll, checked out the NDP’s electoral machinery in his home riding of Outremont in Montreal and thanked volunteers.

With files from Murray Brewster, Jim Bronskill, Jennifer Ditchburn, Bill Graveland, and Chinta Puxley