Canadian voters handed Justin Trudeau’s Liberals a political victory Monday but pulled the rug out from under his hopes for a second majority government. The result was an electoral rebuke that will force the Liberal leader to negotiate with other parties to try to govern as a minority prime minister.

Preliminary results show the Liberal party won the most seats, electing MPs in 156 ridings.

But it was not enough to form a majority government unfettered by the need to make political compromises to stay alive. For that, Trudeau needed 170 seats in the 338-seat Commons.

The Conservatives under rookie leader Andrew Scheer came second — winning or leading in 122 ridings — and in the process defeated a few high-profile ministers and shut the Liberals out of Alberta and Saskatchewan entirely.

The Conservatives beat the Liberals, winning a greater share of the popular vote 34.5 per cent or 5.69 million votes cast, to the Liberals’ 32.9 per cent or 5.43 million votes.

The separatist Bloc Québécois, which re-emerged as a political force during the campaign, was in third place, winning in 32 seats. Based on early results, the NDP under Jagmeet Singh won or was leading in 24 ridings — enough to shore up a Trudeau minority. The Green party was leading in three. The People’s Party failed to elect a single candidate and leader Maxime Bernier lost his seat.

The overall result reflected voter ambivalence toward the two major federal parties, which had been deadlocked in public polls throughout the bitter 41-day campaign, one of the country’s most divisive elections in recent memory.

No one issue emerged as dominant, and no platform captured the imagination of voters. In the end, it appeared to come down to a question of Canadians evaluating the individual leaders, with voters not ready to hand power to Scheer, nor willing to cut Trudeau much slack.

U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted congratulations to Trudeau “on a wonderful and hard fought victory. Canada is well served. I look forward to working with you toward the betterment of both of our countries!”

In Montreal, Trudeau, 47, watched the results roll in with his family and senior organizers. The results, while a win, are nevertheless a disappointment as party officials had dared to hope for the past four days they might score another majority.

Instead, Trudeau lost ground, and cabinet colleagues: Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale in Saskatchewan and Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi lost their seats.

Trudeau’s victory speech pre-empted network coverage of Scheer’s concession speech. The prime minister said he believed voters rejected the Conservatives’ plan for cuts and austerity, and gave him instead a mandate to make life more affordable for Canadians and to enact his plans to improve Indigenous lives and to tackle climate change. He addressed Alberta and Saskatchewan, saying he understood “their frustrations” as well as the concerns of Quebec, where he lost seats to the Bloc, and vowed to govern for all Canadians.

Across the country, Scheer delivered a defiant address to his supporters, saying he was disappointed but proud of the result, and declared “we are the government in waiting.” He said the election results show Canada has never been more divided.

“Conservatives have put Justin Trudeau on notice. Mr. Trudeau, when your government falls, Conservatives will be ready and win.”

A Liberal insider said Trudeau succeeded in the last few weeks in rallying young voters aged 18-35 and women to support him again. The ballot tallies included 4.7 million ballots cast last weekend in advance polls, nearly 30 per cent more than the advance votes in 2015.

After an aggressive campaign that combined attacks on Trudeau as a “phoney” and a “liar” with an appeal to Canadians’ pocketbook concerns, Scheer was able to lead the Conservatives to increase their seat count from 99 in the 2015 election, and increase the party’s share of the popular vote.

Scheer, the father of five with a “dad bod” and an “every-man” appeal had promised tax cuts, an end to Trudeau’s carbon-price-and-rebate system, and help for the oil and gas sector.

It was not enough to topple Trudeau — politically wounded by ethics scandals, broken promises and shocking revelations of his youthful dalliances in “blackface” — despite the Tory leader’s dire warnings the Liberals would form a “dangerous” free-spending coalition with the New Democrats.

But the result is an endorsement by Scheer’s party’s base and it may be enough to fend off any would-be leadership rivals looking for someone to blame.

There have already been internal grumblings about Scheer’s failure to quickly douse fires over his views on abortion and same-sex marriage, revelations about his dual U.S.-Canada citizenship and his hiring of a professional mudslinging operation to tar Bernier’s People’s Party.

Scheer also lost a key member of his team, deputy leader Lisa Raitt, who was defeated by a Liberal star candidate, Olympian Adam van Koeverden.

Over the weekend, several Conservatives told the Star Scheer will survive because he still enjoys most of his caucus members’ support, held the east-west coalition together after Bernier split to form the farther right People’s Party, and hewed to Stephen Harper’s traditional conservative values of lower taxes, smaller government, a plan to balance the budget and a more muscular foreign policy.

“The story right now for us, looking at the results right now, is that Justin Trudeau has lost his coveted majority,” Cory Hann, the director of communications for the Conservative Party, told the Star’s Alex Boutilier.

“This was a government in 2015 that everyone in here was told was going to govern this country as a juggernaut for the better part of a decade … with majority after majority after majority. What we see tonight is that is not the case.”

Most important, Trudeau’s minority government may not last any longer than the usual 18-24 months with another election in the offing. Party sources have told the Star the Conservatives, who out-fundraised the other parties in the past year, already have set aside a second war chest to fight if another election were imminent.

In fact, a minority means the Trudeau Liberals will no longer control votes in Commons committees, and so it is conceivable that the Conservatives and NDP, who called for a public inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin affair, will now be able to mount one in the ethics or justice committees where the Liberals had previously blocked committee probes.

The New Democrats under Singh emerged after an energetic campaign that defied his critics with 24 seats.

Although it was fewer than the 39 seats held by the party at the campaign’s start, five weeks ago, New Democrat organizers were thrilled with Singh’s performance, and credit him with saving the party from a much bigger defeat.

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Singh, who gave off a groovy, loose vibe, taking selfies and Instagramming his way through a low-budget campaign, was the only federal leader to gain in public approval over the past weeks, after a dynamic performance in the English and French language debates.

The New Democrat leader displayed the empathy, authenticity and a “sunny ways” demeanour that Trudeau once ran with, and won, in 2015. That, and platform promises to spend $15 billion to combat climate change, took votes from Trudeau, but also from the Greens.

In Quebec, the resurgence of the Bloc Québécois over the course of the campaign changed the political landscape.

The Bloc scooped 34 seats — enough to return to official party status for the first time since the 2008 election. But it was the Bloc that won big in a province where the Liberals had hoped to capitalize on an expected NDP collapse.

At a victory party for Bloc Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet, the crowd chanted “We want a country!” Blanchet replied “Me too,” but added that “this time the realization of sovereignty is not part of our mandate.” He said he will not form a coalition with anyone but would work on a case-by-case basis to advance Quebec’s interests and ensure Quebec’s “voice” is heard in Ottawa.

The Green Party under Elizabeth May, 65, long the party’s lone MP, started its fourth federal campaign with her as leader having added one other Vancouver Island MP to its ranks and stealing an NDP incumbent in Quebec, Pierre Nantel. It wasn’t enough — Nantel lost to a Liberal.

May had hoped to win up to seven seats but the Greens seemed unable to translate a rise of public concern about the environment and climate change into big gains in the Commons, although they chalked up a breakthrough in the east, taking a seat in Fredericton, N.B.

Still, May was thrilled by that win, telling CTV she had hoped by the end of the night that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives had a majority government, and would be forced to work with others on climate change. “What’s important is that we act on the climate emergency in a way that is serious,” she said.

Where the Liberals suffered losses — to the Conservatives in Atlantic Canada and to the Bloc Québécois in Quebec — they held or gained enough in Ontario and B.C. to hang onto power and lay claim to the right to try to win the confidence of the House of Commons after a Throne Speech.

Yet the late campaign surge by the NDP’s Singh clearly stole progressive voters from Trudeau.

As for two female cabinet ministers who resigned their posts and were later turfed from Trudeau’s Liberal caucus during the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Jody Wilson-Raybould won a tight three-way race in her Vancouver Granville riding, while Jane Philpott had lost hers in Markham-Stouffville.

The night’s results show history repeating itself.

Only one other prime minister failed to win a second majority after a first-term majority government: Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau, the father, won a majority Liberal government in 1968 amid a wave of Trudeaumania, but in 1972 was dramatically reduced to a slim minority, just two seats more than Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield. The New Democrats held the balance of power, and Trudeau went on to govern for another two years, and win another majority in 1974.

In his book on the political career of Pierre Trudeau, author Bob Plamondon described how the Liberal leader did not see the slim 1972 minority as a loss. Trudeau himself later wrote it allowed him to put forward left-wing projects.

“I knew that the NDP, under David Lewis, would back me up — in fact, the NDP supported me when some of the more conservative members of my own party did not. I was thus able to institute policies that I had been dreaming about for a long time, and the social Democratic faction of the opposition was forced to support them, or else deny their own social program,” Pierre Trudeau said.

Now Trudeau, the son, will have to seek allies too. He could find common ground among the NDP or the Greens, or even the Bloc Québécois on an issue-by-issue basis.

Singh said he was ready to work in a “constructive role” in the new parliament, and told Trudeau that he wanted to advance “the people’s priorities,” listing a national public single-payer pharmacare program, affordable housing, student debt relief, capping cellphone bills, taxing internet giants and ending fossil fuel subsidies. He stressed he would continue to press for a tax on the superwealthy.

A Liberal cabinet minister who won re-election Monday night said last week that Trudeau would be unlikely to seek to form a formal coalition — which means giving another political party ministerial seats around the cabinet table — because it is seen as politically impossible to retain cabinet secrecy.

Rather the likelihood is Trudeau would seek to recall Parliament with a Throne Speech that could earn the confidence of enough MPs, and then seek to implement a legislative agenda, one issue at a time.

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