Justin Trudeau was back in his element on Tuesday morning.

After a short night, the Canadian Prime Minister thanked his voters early in the morning in a subway station in Montreal, just as he always does after elections.

That he was beaming could be seen even under his face mask.

He is now the country's eighth Prime Minister to win a third term.

Nevertheless, the liberal has not achieved what he actually intended with the new elections.

Majid Sattar

Political correspondent for North America based in Washington.

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On Tuesday night, he appeared at his party's headquarters in Montreal, where his constituency is Papineau, and called out to his supporters: The voter had sent him back to work "with a clear mandate" to guide Canada through the pandemic . In the election campaign, Trudeau continued, some had talked about division. Meanwhile, he saw how Canadians stood together to fight the pandemic and campaign for climate protection and social policy.

For a brief moment he then seemed to admit a mistake: He heard the voices of everyone who just wanted their old life back, a life in which they would not have to worry about a pandemic. And not a choice either, he said. That was exactly what Trudeau had been accused of - by the political competitor on the right and left: In August, in the midst of a pandemic, he had a completely superfluous early parliamentary election scheduled because he saw the opportunity to have another after two years in which he had headed a minority cabinet to obtain an absolute majority.

The voters denied him this.

The future lower house is the same as the old one.

The exact distribution of seats will only be known in the coming days, when the many postal votes have been counted.

It is already clear that the Liberals will receive fewer than the necessary 170 seats.

The good news for Trudeau and his liberals is that the metropolitan regions in central Canada, especially the populous suburbs of Toronto and Montreal, continued to be the bastions of the party.

The Conservatives under their new chairman Erin O'Toole had hoped to be able to grow beyond their strongholds in the less densely populated provinces of western Canada.

Conservative leader is not resigning for the time being

Especially in the province of Ontario, where 48-year-old O'Toole grew up. He even tried to open himself up politically and changed his conservative positions, for example on dealing with the LGBTQ community or on the issue of gun rights. Of course, the change came so quickly that O'Toole was accused of doing political pirouettes for all too obvious reasons. In the end, the Tories roughly held their 2019 result, which means that although they are likely to be just ahead of the Liberals in terms of absolute votes across the country, as they were two years ago, they were unable to gain any constituencies.

When the leader of the Conservatives spoke to his supporters on election evening, he tried, as it were, to forestall calls for resignation: if Trudeau should seek new elections in 18 months, he would be ready to lead the Conservatives. However, he promised a critical election analysis, in which errors in the campaign would also be addressed. So that is not the end of the discussions in the party, especially since O'Toole's moderate course has been criticized. The right-wing populist People's Party of the former Conservative Maxime Bernier was unable to win parliamentary seats, but was able to steal important bourgeois votes from the Tories in many constituencies.

There were no significant changes for the separatist Bloc Québécois under Yves-François Blanchet and the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP). Blanchet wanted to build on his 2019 success, aiming for 40 seats in Quebec - there are 78 constituencies in the province. Despite possible gains, he missed the target.

The NDP will certainly continue to play the role of tolerating the liberal minority cabinet - formal coalitions are not part of Canada's political culture. The open question of what future NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has. The practicing Sikh, who has led the party since 2017, is popular, but for the second time has not been able to translate his popularity into additional parliamentary seats. That was exactly what he had promised in order to have more influence on Trudeau, especially in climate and social policy.