Canada's Harper Returned to Power As Prime Minister

In some ways, the campaign here was overshadowed by the electioneering underway in the United States. One of the debates here took place on the same night as the American vice presidential debate, which is believed to have attracted more Canadian viewers and interest.

"A lot of our citizens pay more attention to what's happening in your election than to ours," Wiseman said.

Members of the Liberal Party, he said, had been hoping to go to the polls after the American election, bolstered by an expected strong showing for the Democratic Party. "They thought they would get that afterglow," Wiseman said.

Americans, accustomed to presidential campaigns lasting two years, would scarcely recognize the lightning-fast 37-day Canadian campaign.

After the election was called, the world financial crisis broke out, catching up Canada even though its banks are considered generally healthy, home prices have dipped only slightly and there is no serious subprime mortgage problem.

Last Friday, the Canadian dollar fell 2.8 percent against the U.S. dollar, and stocks here followed the worldwide collapse. Canada is also facing heavy job cuts in the automobile industry, with Chrysler Canada, Ford and General Motors of Canada all planning to curtail production.

Harper depicted himself as the candidate best-equipped to steer Canada out of the global economic crisis, calling Dion a risky choice. "If you want a prime minister who will protect the economy, then I ask you for a mandate," Harper said at one closing rally.

But Harper, 49, was forced to answer critics on the left that he is too conservative for most Canadians and that he wants to impose a right-wing social agenda on such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.

His opponents tried to tie Harper to President Bush, who is hugely unpopular here. "Just because someone's a Conservative doesn't mean he's George Bush," Harper was quoted as saying Saturday on a campaign trip to Quebec.

Dion, for his part, struggled to connect with voters. A native French speaker, he speaks heavily accented English that is sometimes difficult to understand. The 53-year-old Dion was criticized as remote and professorial, befitting his background as a sociologist and political scientist.

Dion was also hurt by his campaign pledge to impose a carbon tax to fight global warming, analysts said. Harper said that an economic downturn was no time to impose a new tax on Canadians.

The Liberals have governed Canada for most of its history, thanks in part to a fractious right. But Harper was able to unite two parties on the conservative side of the spectrum, and now it is the left that is fragmented, between the Liberals, the New Democrats and the environmentalist Green Party.

Appealing for support for the Liberals from backers of other left-of-center parties, Dion noted recently: "If we pool our votes together, we will win this election."

Those parties together would have enough seats to form a government, it appeared. But that was widely considered unlikely -- historically, the party winning the most seats in Parliament forms the government.

Foreign policy has largely receded as an issue here, despite the release of an independent parliamentary report showing the total costs of keeping Canadian troops in Afghanistan set to reach 18 billion Canadian dollars (about $15.5 billion) by 2011 -- far more than initial government estimates. Canadian troops around Kandahar have been engaged in some of the most intense fighting of the war. Nearly 100 Canadians have been killed.

Canadian involvement in the war has only lukewarm support here. Harper, however, appeared to have defused the war as an election issue with a surprise pledge to withdraw all 2,500 troops by 2011. Dion had also said his party would withdraw them by 2011, so Harper's announcement seemed to undercut the Liberals' position.