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Canada  

Liberals win Nfld. majority

The Liberals in Newfoundland and Labrador won a majority of the seats in Monday's provincial election, ending 12 years of Progressive Conservative rule by sticking to a low-key campaign that tapped into voters' desire for change.

Buoyed by Liberal victories in every one of Atlantic Canada's 32 federal ridings on Oct. 19, provincial Liberal Leader Dwight Ball repeatedly invoked Justin Trudeau's winning strategy, saying, "People of our province want politics of hope, of change."

Once Ball assumes power, every province east of Manitoba will be governed by Liberals, and there won't be any governments — federal or provincial — using the Conservative brand.

As the early results established a strong trend, dozens of Liberals supporters started pounding thunder sticks inside Ball's campaign headquarters at a Corner Brook hotel.

Elected as Tory leader only 13 months ago, Paul Davis told voters the election was about leadership. But he also issued dire warnings about what he called a Liberal hidden agenda that includes making massive cuts to government spending and public service jobs to deal with a projected $1-billion deficit.

Just before the campaign started, Davis offered a twist on Trudeau's positive campaign style, saying if the Liberals were elected, "it won't be sunny skies for Newfoundland and Labrador." One of his campaign ads had him standing in front of a government building claiming that Ball's agenda would "empty this parking lot and many more like it."

For his part, Ball stuck to a low-key, front-runner strategy that included a politically popular pledge to kill a Tory plan to increase government revenue by raising the harmonized sales tax from 13 to 15 per cent on Jan. 1.

NDP Leader Earle McCurdy, a 65-year-old former union leader who was elected party leader last year, took aim at the Liberal promise to find $400 million in savings, saying the only way they can achieve that is by cutting government jobs, which Ball has denied.

McCurdy has said Ball's commitment to grow the provincial economy through diversification "reads like a letter to Santa."

The Conservative party's popularity seemed unassailable during Danny Williams' tenure as premier between 2003 and 2010, when a growing offshore energy sector helped increase government spending from $5 billion to $7 billion.

Under Kathy Dunderdale, Tory popularity tanked. She introduced unpopular legislation aimed at restricting access to information and was accused of being politically tone deaf in January 2014 when she dismissed a series of rolling blackouts that left tens of thousands of people in the dark for days.

Dunderdale's departure three weeks later was followed by an aborted leadership race and a sustained slide in world oil prices, which has crippled the province's finances. In 2013, about one third of provincial revenue came from the offshore energy sector, but that figure has since dropped to about 20 per cent, leading to much larger projected deficits.

This election campaign was fought using an electoral map that reduced the number of seats in the legislature from 48 to 40 in a bid to cut costs. At dissolution, the Tories held 28 seats, the Liberals had 16, the New Democrats three and there was one vacant seat.



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