Electoral maps get new colours across Canada

By Janice Tibbetts
Canwest News Service

OTTAWA - Ontario voters rejigged their electoral map Tuesday, with more seats going Tory blue than they have since the Mulroney years as the province helped propel the Conservatives to a comfortable minority.

The Liberals lost key ground in Canada's most populated province in both votes and seat count as the Conservatives, benefitting from Liberal vote splitting with the NDP, stole about one dozen seats that went red in 2006.

Ontario marked the biggest regional change in Canada, along with British Columbia, which appeared late Tuesday night to be headed for Conservative domination at the expense of the floundering Liberals, poised to lose several of the seats they won the last time around.

Other regions, however, resisted significant change. Quebecers once again granted the Bloc Quebecois the majority of the province's 75 seats and the Prairies remained largely Tory blue. Atlantic Canadians kept the Liberals as the dominant force in the region.

On the East Coast, the Conservatives lost all three of their seats in Newfoundland, brought down by Premier Danny Williams's ferocious anything-but-Conservative campaign over Prime Minister Stephen Harper breaking a 2006 election promise involving offshore oil revenues.

What the Harper Conservatives lost in Newfoundland, they gained in New Brunswick, stealing three ridings from the Liberals in the province, including the seat held by former solicitor-general Andy Scott.

In the end, however, voters in Atlantic Canada sent only two fewer Liberals to Ottawa, with a contingent of 18. The New Democrats picked up two more of the 32 seats in the region, for a total of five, and the Conservatives, while they slipped about six per cent in the popular vote, secured one more seat than they did in the last election.

The Conservatives, however, slipped six per cent in the popular vote in Atlantic Canada since 2006, perhaps unable to overcome a suspicion of Harper from his Canadian Alliance days, when he referred to the East Coast as the home of a "defeatist culture."

Quebecers, who appeared ready to turn away from the Bloc Quebecois in large numbers in the early days of the election, granted Gilles Duceppe and his separatists the majority of the province's 75 seats and refused to give Harper and his Conservatives the extra votes they had been seeking to win a majority.

Duceppe made electoral gains by capitalizing on a sentiment that Conservative cuts to arts and culture were an affront to francophone culture. The Bloc leader also bundled the program cancellations with Harper's crackdown on youth crime - a perennial hard sell in the province - to portray the prime minister as being out of step with Quebec values.

The Conservatives, despite significant gains in Ontario, also failed to make a breakthrough in Harper's birth city of Toronto, which remained a Liberal fortress with some New Democrat pockets. Prominent Liberals in the city, including former leadership contenders Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, were all re-elected.