Mulroney Party Leads in Canada : Conservatives Will Win, Assuring U.S. Trade Pact, State TV Projects

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. declared that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his Progressive Conservative Party won the Canadian parliamentary elections Monday with enough of a majority to guarantee ratification of the U.S.-Canada free-trade agreement.

CBC, the government-run television channel, declared Mulroney the winner on the basis of early returns from eastern Canada. Polls were still open in western areas of the country.

Shortly before 9 p.m. EST, less than an hour after the polls closed in the key provinces of Ontario and Quebec, CBC reported that the Conservatives won or were leading in the races for 113 seats. It said the Liberal Party of former Prime Minister John Turner won or was leading in the races for 71 seats, and it gave 11 seats to the socialist New Democratic Party of Ed Broadbent.

Mulroney needs 148 seats to have a majority in the 295-seat House of Commons and push through the free-trade agreement, which became the central issue in the election campaign.

Liberals Gain in East

The returns showed that the Liberals made large gains throughout the east but not enough to threaten the reelection of the 49-year-old Mulroney.

Mulroney has pledged that, if reelected with a majority, he will call the new House of Commons into session swiftly and pass the agreement.

Even though the Conservatives were projected to win a majority of seats in Parliament, they were not capturing a majority of the popular vote. Those figures indicated that the voters, splitting their ballots between the Liberals and the New Democrats--both of whom were intensely opposed to the free trade agreement--were also expressing opposition to the pact.

According to the CBC, the Conservatives had 43% of the vote, the Liberals 38% and the New Democrats 17% in the early returns.

Under the Canadian system, elections are held in each of the 295 parliamentary districts; to win a seat, a candidate must have the largest number of votes in that district. Since three parties were fighting for seats in Monday’s elections, a party could win in a given district and yet still capture less than half the total votes.

Few elections have engaged the interest and enthusiasm of Canadians the way this one has, and the turnout was reportedly heavy throughout the country. There were 17.5 million eligible voters, and analysts expected at least 75% to cast ballots.

The campaign was regarded as one of the most rancorous and negative in 20th-Century Canadian politics, with Progressive Conservative television commercials accusing Turner of lying and Liberal commercials showing a cartoon caricature of Mulroney saluting the American flag.

Turner denounced the flurry of negative ads as “the Americanization of our campaign,” and many Canadian journalists, in their accounts of the advertising, seemed to agree with him. The Liberals obviously hoped for a backlash--that the negative nature of the television spots would reinforce the feeling that Canada needed protection against American ways.

In 1984, Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives won 211 of the 282 seats then in the House of Commons, the most overwhelming victory in the history of Canadian national elections. The Liberals won 40 seats and the New Democrats 30. There was one independent.

Complex Document

The free-trade agreement, which was signed by Mulroney and President Reagan and approved by the U.S. Congress earlier this year, is a complex and lengthy document understood by few Canadians. Under the pact, all tariffs would be eliminated between the two countries, already the largest trading partners in the world, over a 10-year-period beginning Jan. 1.

During the campaign, Mulroney called the agreement “a vision for Canada” that would create 250,000 jobs through increased Canadian exports. He acknowledged that some people might lose work at first because their industries would lose the protection of Canadian tariffs. But he argued that they would be re-trained for new jobs in the general prosperity created by lower consumer prices and increased trade.

On top of this, Mulroney insisted that failure to ratify the agreement would provoke the U.S. government into imposing trade sanctions on Canada.

Turner argued that, while he supports the principle of free trade, the agreement would be a bad deal for Canada. He said Mulroney had failed to gain guarantees that Canadians could sell all their goods to the American market without restriction. The Liberal leader also deplored the creation of a binational panel to settle trade disputes because, he said, the guidelines of the panel were weighted in favor of American law.

All in all, Turner contended, the trade agreement would endanger Canadian sovereignty. This view was supported by the New Democrats’ Broadbent, who said, “This deal is forcing us to conform to the concept of an American continent whose strength lies in the almighty dollar . . . where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”