Ottawa: Canadians vote on Monday in an election expected to drive the Liberal Party from power after 12 dominant years, and nudge the country to the right with a new Conservative-led government.
With 45 Indo-Canadians in the fray the Parliament is bound to see some representation from the community regardless of which party wins vote.
Most of the Indo-Canadians running for the elections are from the Conservative Party (13), followed by the ruling Liberal Party (11) and the New Democratic Party(8).
Canada's Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh, Ruby Dhalla, youngest Member of Parliament, Herb Dhaliwal, Gurbax Malhi, Navdeep Bains, Jagtar Shergil, Bal Gosal, Jaipal Massey-Singh are among the 45 candidates of Indian origin who for the past six weeks have been campaigning for votes through personal contacts and other means of communications.
The Liberal Party's fortunes are clearly on the slide. Four are contesting from the Green Party and two each from the Communist party and the Progressive Canadian Party.
Indo-Canadians are concentrated in just a few of the 13 provinces. Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta lead in numbers. Ten of the Indo-Canadian candidates are Members of Parliament.
A total of 1,634 candidates are in the running for 308 seats. The election was necessitated after the Liberal Party's minority government lost a No-Confidence Motion in December.
Stephen Harper, the 46-year-old Conservative leader, is pledging to cleanse government in Ottawa and mend strained relations with the US.
But Prime Minister Paul Martin, 67, desperate for a miraculous comeback to confound polls in which he trails badly, has branded Harper an "extremist" closer to US arch conservatives than socially moderate Canadians.
After seven weeks of jarring rhetoric, party leaders criss-crossed the vast country on Sunday to close the campaign held unusually in Canada's savage winter after the Liberal-led minority government folded in November.
Harper, a former academic who smoothed a once abrasive image and tracked to the center in a tightly disciplined campaign, basked in opinion polls which gave him a 10-point lead over Martin -- enough for a minority government.
"We can win because it is time for a change, time to move forward, time to get beyond the scandals and investigations and corruption," he told cheering supporters in the frigid central city of Winnipeg Sunday.
"Let the Liberals claim, for Canada, this is as good as it gets. I know for our Canada, the best is yet to come," he said, chastising his main opponents as a "disorganized, directionless and desperate government."
Conservatives, historically strong out west, hoped for inroads into Liberal strongholds in Ontario, and to eke out a few seats in Quebec.
(With Agency inputs)
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