Canadians are electing a new Parliament on Monday after a tight election campaign that has raised the threat of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being knocked from power after just one term.

The 47-year-old Trudeau channelled the star power of his father, the liberal icon and late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, when he won in 2015 but a combination of scandal and high expectations have damaged his prospects.

The Liberals and Tories went into the home stretch in a dead heat, each with about 31-32 percent support after 40 days of mudslinging.

Pollsters are predicting a minority government will result from Monday’s vote – led either by the Liberals or the Conservatives – as the smaller New Democratic Party (NDP), Green Party and Bloc Québécois have continued to chip away at the frontrunners’ leads.

Not in 84 years has a first-term Canadian prime minister with a parliamentary majority lost a bid for re-election.ADVERTISING

Trudeau reasserted liberalism in 2015 after almost 10 years of Conservative Party government in Canada, but he is one of the few remaining progressive leaders in the world. He has been viewed as a beacon for liberals south of the border in the Donald Trump era, even appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine under the headline “Why Can’t He Be Our President?”

Barack Obama✔@BarackObama

I was proud to work with Justin Trudeau as President. He’s a hard-working, effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change. The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbors to the north support him for another term.

Perhaps sensing Trudeau is in trouble, Barack Obama last week made an unprecedented endorsement by a former US president in urging Canadians to re-elect Trudeau, calling him an “effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change”.

“The world needs his progressive leadership now,” Obama tweeted Wednesday.

Lapses

Plagued by a blackface scandal and accused of ethics lapses in the handling of the bribery prosecution of an engineering giant, Trudeau has seen his star dim, his judgment questioned and his personal popularity slip over the past year.

He was hurt by the scandal that erupted earlier this year when his former attorney general said he pressured her to halt the prosecution of a Quebec company. Trudeau has said he was standing up for jobs, but the damage gave a boost to the Conservative Party led by Andrew Scheer.

Justin Trudeau✔@JustinTrudeau

A little rain can’t stop us! Port Moody’s ready to #ChooseForward.

No party is expected to get a majority of Parliament’s 338 seats, so a shaky alliance may be needed to pass legislation.

If it is the Conservatives who win the most seats – but not a majority – they will probably try to form a government with the backing of Quebec’s separatist Bloc Québécois. In contrast, Trudeau’s Liberals would likely rely on the NDP to stay in power.

Attack machine

Scheer, meanwhile, has struggled to convince voters to look past his dull, minivan-driving dad persona and the party’s minimalist platform to give the rookie leader a chance to govern.

Throughout the campaign, the devout Catholic father-of-five faced criticism for padding his resume and over his personal opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

A career politician who served as Canada’s youngest Speaker of the House of Commons, Scheer is described by those in his own party as bland, a possible antidote for those tired of Trudeau’s flash. The 40-year-old fiscal and moral conservative calls Trudeau a phony who can’t even recall how many times he has worn blackface.

Andrew Scheer✔@AndrewScheer

Justin Trudeau will pay any price to stay in power and he will use your money to do it.

A Trudeau-NDP coalition is a coalition you can’t afford.

I’ve spent the last 39 days talking about my plan to help you get ahead, and a Conservative government will do just that.

Conservative Jason Kenney, Alberta’s premier and a close friend of Scheer, calls the party leader “an extremely normal Canadian” who is so nice he “can’t fake being mean”.

Scheer, however, has so relentlessly attacked Trudeau that Nik Nanos, a Canadian pollster, said he hasn’t been himself.

“Scheer has been hostage to the message,” Nanos said. “His campaign has made him into an attack machine.”

Conservative supporters chanted “Lock him up! Lock him up!” at a rally Saturday after Scheer said he would investigate Trudeau’s attorney general scandal – mirroring the Hillary Clinton “Lock her up!” chant popular at Trump rallies. Scheer moved to calm the crowd and changed the chant to “Vote him out”.

Hugging refugees

Trudeau embraced immigration at a time when the US and other countries were closing their doors, even personally welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada with a hug and a gift of a parka. More than 45,000 Syrians were resettled in the country during his first term in office.

Under Trudeau’s leadership, Canada became only the second nation to legalise cannabis, held a public inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, and passed legislation permitting medically assisted suicide.

His also negotiated a new free trade deal for Canada with the US and Mexico amid threats by President Donald Trump to scrap it.

But Trudeau’s efforts to strike a balance on the environment and the economy have been criticised by both the right and left. He brought in a carbon tax to fight climate change but rescued a stalled pipeline expansion project to get Alberta’s oil to international markets.

Scheer, for his part, is promising to end the carbon tax and cut government spending, including foreign aid, by 25 percent.

“That money belongs to you, not to them,” Scheer said.

Battleground push

Their voices hoarse, the frontrunning rivals made last, desperate pitches to undecided voters over the weekend in the key battleground provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

“We need a strong, progressive government that will unite Canadians and fight climate change, not a progressive opposition,” Trudeau told a rally in a suburb of Vancouver after whistle-stops in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

“We need to unite as citizens. We need to unite as a planet,” the Liberal leader said.

Scheer, also crisscrossing the country over the weekend, accused the Liberals of being spendthrift, saying on Sunday in Vancouver: “The choice tomorrow is between a Liberal-NDP coalition that will run massive deficits and leave less money in your pocket or a Conservative government that will get back to balanced budgets and make life more affordable.”

“Trudeau would pay any price to stay in power and he’d use your money to do it,” he continued. “We want Canadians to send Conservative MPs to Ottawa to undo the damage that Justin Trudeau has caused.”

(FRANCE 24 with AP and AFP)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, facing the loss of his Parliamentary majority in an election next week, traded attacks with his main rival on Saturday as a bad-tempered campaign entered the last few days.

Trudeau came to power in 2015 promising “sunny ways” and a new way of doing politics but saw his popularity drop earlier this year amid an ethics scandal. Images of him in blackface emerged last month, further hurting his Liberal Party ahead of the Oct. 21 election.

The 47-year-old prime minister, his voice increasingly hoarse, said Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer would slash spending and rip up Liberal plans to fight climate change.

Polls show the Liberals and the Conservatives in a dead heat, with neither able to capture a majority of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. This would leave the winner in a vulnerable position, seeking to govern with smaller parties.

“I am very excited and confident about the choice Canadians are making,” Trudeau answered when asked if he was worried about losing. “And the question they’re facing is with that vote do we stop conservative cuts? Do we invest in our families and in our future and make life more affordable for them?” Trudeau said after a rally in a fire station in the Ontario city of Hamilton, to the west of Toronto.

In the absence of an overriding narrative, dirty tactics and awkward moments have characterized the campaign.

A Nanos Research poll for the Globe and Mail and CTV released on Saturday put the Liberals at 32.6% public support and the main official Conservatives at 30.3%. The left-leaning New Democrats, who compete for the same voters as the Liberals, were at 18.4%.

Trudeau sidestepped questions about his plans if he did not win a majority. Minority governments in Canada rarely last more than two and a half years.

Scheer, speaking at a campaign event on Saturday, said Trudeau would spend his first 100 days negotiating a coalition with the New Democrats that would impose tax hikes.

“It’s quite clear that under Justin Trudeau region has been pit against region. Justin Trudeau has divided Canadians. He’s divided provinces. He’s failed to stand up for the types of big ideas, the big projects that can bring this country together,” he said during a pit stop in North York, Ontario.

Trudeau and Scheer made multiple trips to Ontario, which accounts for 108 of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. The Liberals hold 76 of those seats.

Trudeau was scheduled to make four stops in Ontario before flying later on Saturday to the western provinces of Manitoba and Alberta, where anger against the Liberals is rising over government environmental measures that critics complain will hobble the energy industry.

(Source: Reuters)

U.S. presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders returned to the campaign trail in New York City on Saturday, three weeks after suffering a heart attack, and pledged to resume at full throttle his battle against the business and political establishment, including members of his own Democratic Party.

“I am more than ready to assume the office of President of the United States. I am more than ready to take on the greed and corruption of the corporate elite and their apologists,” Sanders told a gathering of thousands of people holding aloft placards at the Queensbridge Park.

“To put it bluntly, I am back.”

Sanders, one of 19 Democrats fighting to take on Republican President Donald Trump at the polls in November 2020 was introduced by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the leaders of the party’s progressives and a frequent target of Trump’s attacks.

The congresswoman announced her support to Sanders’ campaign as his campaign battled to overcome the health scare and a surge in support for Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.

Sanders, 78, the oldest candidate in the crowded Democratic field, has bounced back rapidly since the Oct. 1 heart attack that threatened to derail his campaign.

But Sanders, a U.S Senator from Vermont, was already running third behind Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden in most national polls, although Sanders raised more money for his campaign in the last quarter than any other Democrat.

The rally was Sanders’ largest of his 2020 campaign so far, with 25,872 people attending, his campaign said, citing a count by an outside company that managed the event, which Reuters was unable to independently verify.

The number would make the rally larger than one held in the city by Warren last month, Warren’s largest of the campaign.

“His supporters are so much more passionate” than other Democratic candidates, said Christina Martin, 29, from Manhattan, who came to the rally with her mother, also a Sanders supporter and a breast cancer survivor.

Both said Sanders’ proposal for government-run health care was his main draw, and credited him with focusing the Democratic Party on the issue.

“He moved the party so much in the past four years,” said Martin. “We wouldn’t be where we are without him. We wouldn’t be talking about Medicare for All.”

Endorsement

The backing of Ocasio-Cortez is expected to boost Sanders in his efforts to fight off Warren. The filmmaker Michael Moore also spoke to endorse Sanders’ campaign.

Ocasio-Cortez, better known by her initials AOC, was welcomed with chants of “Green New Deal”, a reference to her proposal for a transition to renewable energy sources that has been taken up by Sanders as part of his policy platform.

The New York native went from working as a poorly paid waitress as recently as last year to sitting in Congress, she said, crediting Sanders for her own political awakening and shaking up U.S. politics with his primary challenge of eventual nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves healthcare, housing, education and a living wage,” she told the rally.

Ocasio-Cortez volunteered as an organizer for Sanders’ 2016 campaign before winning her own election to the House of Representatives last year representing a district close to the site of the rally.

Progressive platform

Sanders, after taking the stage to AC/DC’s “Back in Black” song, launched into a wide ranging critique of an unequal U.S. society beset by what he described as the corrupting influence of corporate power.

He noted the park he was speaking in sat beside the country’s largest public housing project, Queensbridge Houses, which he said was in urgent need of repair, while just across the East River lay the shining skyscrapers of Manhattan, where banks and multinational corporations are headquartered.

Sanders said he would invest in public housing and education and write off medical debts, but warned that elites in politics, business and the media were working against his plans to address inequality.

“They want us to believe that the only reality that we can live under is the status quo, that real change is impossible,” said Sanders, also slamming moderate Democrats who questioned the affordability of his proposals during a debate in Ohio on Tuesday night.

He would raise taxes on the rich to pay for his plans, Sanders said, including through a wealth tax on those with a net worth of more than $32 million.

David Cobb, 61, said that, like many at the rally, he was drawn to Sanders’ by his plans for healthcare reform.

Cobb had one arm in a sling from recent shoulder surgery and clutched a “Bernie” placard under the other arm. He was accumulating thousands of dollars of medical debt, he said, despite having some coverage through the existing Medicare plan for older Americans and a health maintenance organization.

“It’s corrupt,” said Cobb. “We’re the only industrialized country in the world that’s like this.”

(REUTERS)