by Our Foreign Desk

CANADIAN Liberals celebrated yesterday after beating Stephen Harper’s Tories in Monday’s general election.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, 43, became prime minister, his party winning an overall majority taking 184 of the 338-seat parliament.

The Conservatives won 99 seats and the New Democratic Party (NDP) just 44. Vote share was 39.5 per cent Liberal, 32 per cent Conservative and 19.6 per cent NDP.

“Tonight Canada is becoming the country it was before,” Mr Trudeau told a victory rally in Montreal.

Mr Harper accepted the defeat and took the blame. “The people are never wrong,” he told supporters in Calgary. “The disappointment is my responsibility and mine alone.”

It was a remarkable comeback for the party that won just 34 seats in 2011, coming third behind the social-democratic NDP.

Mr Trudeau put the victory down to positive campaigning on policies, while left-wing commentators attributed the NDP’s collapse to a shift to the right in recent years.

“We beat fear with hope,” Mr Trudeau said. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together. Most of all we defeated the idea that Canadians should be satisfied with less.”

The Liberals pledged to cut taxes for ordinary Canadians while increasing them for the wealthy and run a deficit for three years to fund infrastructure spending.

They have also promised to address environmental fears over the Keystone oil pipeline from Alberta province through the US to the Gulf of Mexico.

The new government will take in more refugees from Syria and end Canada’s involvement in the illegal US-led air campaign there, while boosting training for Iraqi forces.

The outgoing Tories had refused asylum status to the family of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi and waged a campaign against the Muslim veil and “barbaric practices” such as forced marriage which was seen to stigmatise whole communities. Mr Harper’s government had also cut corporation tax and sought to repeal gun control laws.

The Liberals have promised to legalise cannabis, as the US states of Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon have done.

Mr Trudeau is the son of the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who swept to office in 1968 on a wave of support dubbed “Trudeaumania” and, with a brief hiatus, governed until 1984.