OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
Reuters
Canada's Liberal leader Justin Trudeau rode a late campaign surge to a stunning election victory on Monday, toppling Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives with a promise of change and returning a touch of glamor, youth and charisma to Ottawa.Canada's major television networks projected the Liberals' victory and the party was on the cusp of a majority.
While the final vote count was not yet complete, Trudeau's Liberals were on track to win 174 of Parliament's 338 seats, according to Elections Canada.
Trudeau, 43, the photogenic son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, vaulted from third place to lead the polls in the final days of the campaign, overcoming Conservative attacks that he is too inexperienced and unintelligent to govern.
The projected win ends the Conservatives' nine-year run in power and reflected a political shift away from Harper's brand of fiscal and cultural conservatism. The Conservatives were projected to become the official opposition in Parliament, with the left-leaning New Democratic Party in third.
Al Jazeera America
Canada looked set to end nine years of Conservative rule, late Monday, as election results called by the country's national media showed incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper's party beaten at the polls by a late surge for his Liberal rival, Justin Trudeau. Despite earlier projections that the Liberal Party would fail win an outright majority, potentially giving a king-making role to the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), the national broacaster projected that the Liberals would win 170 seats in Canada's 308-seat parliament.The projected win reflected a political shift away from Harper's brand of fiscal and cultural conservatism. Liberal supporters at the party's campaign headquarters broke into cheers and whistles when television projected that Trudeau would be the next prime minister. Top Trudeau advisor Gerald Butts tweeted "Amazing work #TeamTrudeau. Breathtaking really."
A decisive Liberal victory would confound expectations, after 11 weeks of campaigning, that the election was too close to call, and would produce a virtual tie between the Conservatives, Liberals and the left-leaning New Democratic Party. Polling by Canadian news channel CBC on the eve of the election showed Liberals taking 37 percent of the vote and Conservatives pulling 30 percent.
Ed. note: I thought it would be interesting to post some articles from earlier today. I was especially interested in the investment The New York Times put into the election ending in "a photo finish."
New York Times
OTTAWA — Despite a campaign that was the longest in modern Canada’s history, if remarkably swift by American standards, no obvious outcome has developed as Canadians vote on Monday.Many analysts have said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who has held power for almost a decade, called the vote on Aug. 2 partly in the hope that the more voters saw of Justin Trudeau during his first term as leader of the Liberal Party, the less they would like him. Early Conservative ads emphasized Mr. Trudeau’s relative political inexperience and concluded with the slogan, “He’s just not ready.”
But over the past week, polls have shown Mr. Trudeau and his party steadily increasing their hold on the lead, although not by a sufficient margin for many polling companies to predict a Liberal victory.
The Guardian
America’s neighbour to the north will head to the polls on Monday for what looks likely to be a nail-bitingly close election.The incumbent Conservatives, under Stephen Harper, have not been popular with the Obama administration, partly because they have lobbied the US hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
But with Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s party predicted to win the most seats – if not an outright majority – experts say there is a chance of a thaw in relations between the two countries in time to facilitate real action on issues like climate change.
Of course, the US and Canada are deeply intertwined economically. Each is the other’s largest trading partner: trade between the two countries in 2012 – the most recent year for which data is available from the Office of the United States Trade Representative – totalled $707bn.
BBC
As Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared to address a crowd of blue-clad, thunderstick-banging supporters gathered at a Conservative Party rally in a conference hall on the outskirts of Toronto Saturday night, a small band of protestors gathered in the near-freezing temperatures to offer him a different sort of welcome.There was a giant papier mache version of the prime minister waving a "be afraid" sign, a group of placard-carrying Marxists and a small band of folk singers led by Tony Turner, who performed a song he penned for the election.
"Harperman, it's time for you to go," was the refrain.
Mr Harper, Turner says, "has undermined government in so many different ways".
And if the prime minister's Conservative party loses on Monday night?"I'll crack open a bottle of champagne," Turner laughs.