Liberals in danger of losing majority in closely fought Canada

OTTAWA -- Embarrassed by financial scandal and hard-pressed by a newly united conservative opposition, Canada's Liberal Party heads into national elections Monday in grave danger of losing the parliamentary majority it has held since 1993.

The result, regardless of who gets the most votes, could be one of Canada's most unstable governments in decades -- perhaps hesitant to make bold foreign policy commitments or other tough political decisions.

The final batch of opinion polls suggest that both the Liberals, headed by Prime Minister Paul Martin, and the Conservative Party will fall short of an outright majority of the House of Commons' 308 seats.

In that case, the party with the most seats would face the task of forming a minority government by wooing smaller parties -- the separatist Bloc Quebecois and left-wing New Democratic Party -- into potentially awkward and shifting alliances.

Canada's last minority government was in 1979, and it lasted only six months.

Recent national polls have the two major parties virtually deadlocked, each backed by almost one-third of the voters, with the rest split among undecideds, the New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois -- which operates only in Quebec.

If the Conservatives get to form a government, the new prime minister will be Stephen Harper, 45, a former Parliament member from Alberta who has devoted much of the past decade to strengthening and unifying Canada's right-of-center factions. He has promised to cut middle-class taxes, increase defense spending, expand military ranks from 60,000 to 80,000, and scrap a mandatory national registry of firearms.

If the Liberals emerge from the election as weakened leaders of a minority government, this could further aggravate the sometimes-strained relationship with Washington, said Joel Sokolsky, a Canadian political scientist who has taught at the Royal Military College of Canada and at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts.

The Liberals already have disappointed President Bush's administration by skimping on defense spending and keeping Canadian troops out of Iraq. Canada must decide soon whether to participate in a new U.S. missile defense program; a "No" might further bruise relations.

"A Liberal minority dependent on the New Democrats would push Martin to the left on security issues," Sokolsky said. "From the American standpoint, that would be the worst outcome."

The new Parliament will have seven more members than the outgoing one, in which the Liberals hold 168 seats, the Conservatives 73, the Bloc Quebecois 33 and the New Democrats 14. There are nine independents and four vacant seats.

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