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Bruce Cheadle
THE CANADIAN PRESS

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OTTAWA - Stephen Harper's Conservatives were returned to power in strengthened numbers Tuesday night as Canadian voters entrusted the prime minister with the levers of government in tough economic times.

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Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper prepares to cast his ballot in the 2008 federal election in Calgary on Tuesday.

Ontario, which has so beguiled and befuddled Harper as a national leader, proved to be fertile turf this time around while his hopes of a majority appeared endangered by Quebec.

The Liberal vote sagged badly in Central Canada, once the Grit bread basket that had provided repeated majorities. Vote-splitting in Ontario, with ballots bleeding to the Greens and NDP, was particularly devastating to Liberals in the 905 belt ringing Toronto.

While the Bloc Quebecois romped to a landslide in Quebec - heading for a majority of seats for the sixth consecutive election - the Liberals were also poised to add to their small Quebec caucus.

The Conservatives made a breakthrough of sorts in Quebec in the 2006 election, winning 10 of the province's 75 seats. In pursuit of a majority government, Harper courted Quebec voters assiduously throughout his two-and-a-half year minority. He gave the province a seat on a UN cultural organization, offered up hundreds of millions of dollars in no-strings federal transfers to solve the so-called fiscal imbalance, and - most significantly - formally recognized the "Quebecois nation" in Parliament.

But those efforts did not pay electoral dividends. Stung by Conservative cuts to cultural grants and disconcerted by the government's hang-'em-high youth criminal justice reforms, Quebecers refused to bolster the Tory seat count.

That setback was almost overshadowed by the Ontario results, where actual voting behaviour belied public opinion polling that had much of the province competitive for the Liberals.

Harper appeared certain to build on his party's 127 seats nationally and the 40 in Ontario at dissolution.

Grit fortunes were even more dismal west of Ontario. In Alberta, the NDP was taking more of the popular vote than the Grits, while the Green party was above eight per cent in early returns.

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's first, best chance to make a statement on election night ended with slim Conservative gains in the Maritimes and evidence of a strong NDP attack on the Grit flank.

The Liberals, as expected, won the most seats in Atlantic Canada but did not make up any new ground and, in fact, lost a bit of turf to Harper's Tories and Jack Layton's New Democrats.

In Nova Scotia, Green party Leader Elizabeth May's ambitious bid to dethrone cabinet minister Peter MacKay quickly turned to dust as the long-time Tory pulled away almost from the start.

"We ran an exuberant, a joyful and a positive campaign," said the Green party leader.

"And if the kids five years up could have voted, I would have won by a landslide."

Liberal candidates almost doubled the vote counts of their principal NDP competitors in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the Conservatives were shut out - losing three seats.

Danny Williams, Newfoundland's Progressive Conservative premier, mounted a noisy, nasty "Anything But Conservative" campaign against his federal counterparts.

The Liberals won six of the province's seven seats and New Democrats took one.

But it was by no means a Liberal red Atlantic tide. Tory fortunes were on the rise in New Brunswick and the NDP led the popular vote in Nova Scotia.

Liberals won 17 seats in Atlantic Canada, the Conservatives claimed 10, the New Democrats four and there was one Independent, former Tory Bill Casey elected in Nova Scotia.

After 37 days of negative and often bitter campaigning, Canadians heading out to exercise their franchise were greeted Tuesday with some good news.

The gloom on Bay Street was replaced with an 890-point leap as Canadian markets followed their resurgent U.S. counterparts after the Thanksgiving Day holiday. The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 9.8 per cent after plummeting 16 per cent last week.

The loonie also clawed back 1.4 cents on Tuesday to close at more than 86 cents US, after tumbling almost eight cents in the last week of campaigning.

But this remained an election in which a global credit crisis and looming recession reared like a B-movie Godzilla in mid-campaign, smashing the best-laid plans of all the contenders.

The new Canadian government will spend at least the next year grappling with the economic fall-out, a time when shrinking government revenues and heavy demand for social programs - including employment insurance claims - could force hard decisions to avoid running a federal deficit.

It also seems likely that significant soul-searching will take place among at least some of the five major federal parties, none of which, the polls suggest, managed to captivate a broad cross-section of the Canadian electorate.

Those twin turmoils of economic turbulence and political turnover make handicapping the strength of Canada's 40th Parliament a project that could take some days and weeks to sort out.

It's the third general federal election in four years. Few pundits on voting day cared to wager that it will be four years before the next.

Should the public opinion polls prove reasonably predictive, Canada will have its third consecutive minority government - something that hadn't occurred since 1965.

Prime Minister Harper ignored his own fixed-date election law to drop the writ on Sept. 7. That was more than a year ahead of the October 2009 date envisioned in Conservative legislation that passed the Commons with little dissent.

In sending Canadians to the polls before his government could be defeated in the House, Harper claimed the minority Parliament had become dysfunctional and that he required a fresh mandate to navigate the troubled economic waters ahead.

Those waters whipped up into a sudden fury just two weeks before voting day.

The last poll of the campaign by The Canadian Press Harris-Decima suggested the Conservatives were headed toward a second straight minority government.

But experts were at odds on how election night would play out in Ontario, home to a third of the 308 ridings up for grabs. Three-way vote splits among the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats put dozens of Ontario ridings into play.

British Columbia was also expected to provide some volatility amid signs of shifting voter allegiance in the province.