Trudeau Wins Canada’s Prime Minister Race; Harper Steps Down As Head Of Conservatives

Canadians vot­ed for a sharp change in their gov­ern­ment Monday, return­ing a leg­endary name for lib­er­als, Trudeau, to the prime min­is­ter’s office and resound­ing­ly end­ing Conservative Stephen Harper’s near-decade in office. Justin Trudeau, the son of late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, became Canada’s new prime min­is­ter after his Liberal Party won a major­i­ty of Parliament’s 338 seats. Trudeau’s Liberals had been favored to win the most seats, but few expect­ed the final mar­gin of vic­to­ry. “Tonight Canada is becom­ing the coun­try it was before,” Trudeau said.

He said pos­i­tive pol­i­tics led to his vic­to­ry. “We beat fear with hope,” Trudeau said. “We beat cyn­i­cism with hard work. We beat neg­a­tive, divi­sive pol­i­tics with a pos­i­tive vision that brings Canadians togeth­er. Most of all we defeat­ed the idea that Canadians should be sat­is­fied with less.” Harper, one of the longest-serv­ing Western lead­ers, stepped down as the head of Conservatives, the par­ty said in a state­ment issued as the scope of the loss became appar­ent. Tall and trim, Trudeau, 43, chan­nels the star pow­er — if not quite the polit­i­cal heft — of his father, who swept to pow­er in 1968 on a wave of sup­port dubbed “Trudeaumania.” Pierre Trudeau, who was prime min­is­ter until 1984 with a short inter­rup­tion, remains one of the few Canadian politi­cians known in America, his charis­ma often draw­ing com­par­isons to John F. Kennedy.

Justin Trudeau, a for­mer school­teacher and mem­ber of Parliament since 2008, becomes the sec­ond-youngest prime min­is­ter in Canadian his­to­ry. Trudeau has reen­er­gized the Liberal Party since its worst elec­toral defeat four years ago when they won just 34 seats and fin­ished third behind the tra­di­tion­al­ly weak­er New Democrat Party. Trudeau promis­es to raise tax­es on the rich and run deficits for three years to boost gov­ern­ment spend­ing. His late father, who took office in 1968 and led Canada for most of the next 16 years, is a sto­ried name in Canadian his­to­ry, respon­si­ble for the coun­try’s ver­sion of the Bill of Rights.

A bach­e­lor when he became prime min­is­ter, Pierre Trudeau dat­ed actress­es Barbra Streisand and Kim Cattrall and mar­ried a 22-year-old while in office. Canada has shift­ed to the cen­ter-right under Harper, who has low­ered sales and cor­po­rate tax­es, avoid­ed cli­mate change leg­is­la­tion and clashed with the Obama admin­is­tra­tion over the Keystone XL pipeline. “The peo­ple are nev­er wrong,” Harper said. “The dis­ap­point­ment is my respon­si­bil­i­ty and mine alone.” Harper said he called Trudeau to con­grat­u­late him. The Trudeau vic­to­ry will ease ten­sion with the U.S. Although Trudeau sup­ports the Keystone pipeline, he argues rela­tions should not hinge on the project. Harper has clashed with the Obama admin­is­tra­tion over oth­er issues, includ­ing the recent­ly reached Iran nuclear deal. Trudeau’s oppo­nents pil­lo­ried him as too inex­pe­ri­enced, but Trudeau embraced his boy­ish image on elec­tion day. Sporting jeans and a var­si­ty let­ter jack­et, he posed for a pho­to stand­ing on the thighs of two his col­leagues to make a cheer­lead­ing pyra­mid, his cam­paign plane in the back­drop with “Trudeau 2015” paint­ed in large red letters.

“A sea of change here. We are used to high tides in Atlantic Canada. This is not what we hoped for,” said Peter MacKay, a for­mer senior Conservative Cabinet min­is­ter, short­ly after polls closed in Atlantic Canada. The Liberals were elect­ed or were lead­ing in 185 dis­tricts, with Trudeau win­ning his Montréal dis­trict. The par­ty need­ed 170 to gain a majority.

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The Conservatives were next with 97, fol­lowed by the New Democrats at 28 and Bloc Québécois with nine. Harper, 56, vis­it­ed dis­tricts he won in the 2011 elec­tion in an attempt to hang on to them. On Saturday, he posed with Toronto’s for­mer crack-smok­ing may­or, Rob Ford, in a con­ser­v­a­tive sub­urb. Harper had said he would step down if his par­ty did­n’t win the most seats. Former col­leagues of Harper said he would be per­son­al­ly dev­as­tat­ed to lose to a Trudeau, the lib­er­al lega­cy he entered pol­i­tics to destroy. Harper’s long-term goal was to kill the wide­ly entrenched notion that the Liberals — the par­ty of Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien — are the nat­ur­al par­ty of gov­ern­ment in Canada, and to rede­fine what it means to be Canadian.

Hurt when Canada entered a mild reces­sion this year, Harper made a con­tro­ver­sy over the Islamic face veil a focus of his cam­paign, a deci­sion his oppo­nents seized on to depict him as a divi­sive leader. “Canadians reject­ed the pol­i­tics of fear and divi­sion,” New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair said of the Harper Conservatives. Nelson Wiseman, a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at the University of Toronto, said Canadians ral­lied around the Liberals as the anti-Harper vote. The New Democrats suf­fered a crush­ing defeat, falling to third place after win­ning offi­cial oppo­si­tion sta­tus in the last elec­tion. “I con­grat­u­lat­ed Mr. Trudeau on his excep­tion­al achieve­ment,” Mulcair said. Paula Mcelhinney, 52, of Toronto vot­ed Liberal to get rid of Harper. “I want to get him out; it’s about time we have a new leader. It’s time for a change,” she said.
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