Canadians have re-elected a Liberal government CBC News projects

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau will win enough seats in this 44th general election to form a government, the CBC News decision desk has projected.

It's still too early to say whether it will be a minority or majority government.

It's still a reversal of fortunes for Trudeau. He launched this campaign in mid-August with a sizeable lead in the polls â€" only to see his support crater days later as many voters expressed anger with his decision to prompt an election during the pandemic's fourth wave. Two middling debate performances by Trudeau and renewed questions about past scandals also put a Liberal victory in question.

But in the end, voters decided the Liberal team should continue to govern a country that, while battered and bruised by a health crisis, has also fared well on key pandemic metrics like death rates and vaccine coverage.

Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole has missed his chance to unseat a prime minister who has faced his fair share of challenges during six years in office. O'Toole ran on a plan to boost health care spending, shrink the deficit over 10 years and tighten ethics rules for politicians â€" a more moderate take on conservatism that ultimately fell short.

With Trudeau and the Liberals committed to progressive policies like child care and new housing supports, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh ran even further to the left, promising a dramatic expansion of the federal government through $200 billion in new spending commitments for promises like national pharmacare.

But Singh has been criticized for putting out a platform with few details on how any of this transformative change would be implemented. Singh may have clout in Parliament if voters return a minority Liberal government.

Images from the 2021 federal election:

About 1.6 million votes counted so far, the Liberals have 38 per cent of the ballots cast, the Conservatives have about 33 per cent and the NDP has nearly 16 per cent of the vote share. The Green Party has captured 2.5 per cent of the ballots cast so far, while the People's Party of Canada (PPC) has more than 4.7 per cent of all votes.

It is still too early to call most of the races west of the Quebec-New Brunswick border. The ballot counting is well underway in Atlantic Canada, where the polls have been closed for more than three hours.

While voters have returned a Liberal government to Ottawa, early results from the region's 32 seats suggest O'Toole's more centrist brand of conservatism resonated in Atlantic Canada.

Newfoundland and Labrador and the Maritimes have been a Liberal stronghold for the last two election cycles â€" the party swept every seat there in 2015 and dropped only five in 2019.

Voters line up at the Halifax Convention Centre as they prepare to vote in the federal election on Monday. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

O'Toole, who has appointed a number of Maritimers to senior roles in the party, is on pace to perform better than his recent predecessors did in this region.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper was shut out of Atlantic Canada in 2015 while his successor, Andrew Scheer, picked up only four seats in the 2019 contest â€" three in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia.

O'Toole, who pitched a more moderate form of conservatism than previous Conservative leaders, has already outperformed both Harper and Scheer in the seat count in this part of Canada.

Opposition Conservative Party Leader Erin O'Toole and his wife, Rebecca, cast their ballots in Bowmanville, Ont., Monday. (Adrian Wyld/Reuters) Liberal cabinet minister Bernadette Jordan loses her N.S. seat

According to the CBC News decision desk, Conservative candidates have been declared elected in six of the region's ridings. Conservative Rick Perkins has unseated Liberal incumbent Bernadette Jordan in the Nova Scotia riding of South Shore-St Margarets. Jordan served as fisheries minister in Trudeau's cabinet.

The Conservative candidate in Cumberland-Colchester, Stephen Ellis, has also defeated Liberal incumbent Lenore Zann.

People line up outside a polling station in La Prairie, Que. (Jean-Claude Taliana/CBC/Radio-Canada)

The first projected winner of this election was Liberal incumbent Seamus O'Regan in St. John's Southâ€"Mount Pearl, who serves as natural resources minister in Trudeau's cabinet. Dominic LeBlanc, another Liberal cabinet minister, has also been projected as the winner in his Beauséjour riding in New Brunswick.

Another prominent Liberal, Sean Fraser, the parliamentary secretary to the finance minister, has held off his Conservative challenger in the riding of Central Nova, a seat that was once held by former Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay.

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