A Canadian electorate that appears to have tired of more than a decade of Liberal rule was heading to the polls yesterday, seemingly ready to hand a limited mandate to the Conservatives. It was a rematch of the 2004 election, a neck-and-neck race that ended up giving Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin a minority government, but this time Conservative leader Stephen Harper has built a much more substantial lead of six to 12 percentage points.

Martin's government was toppled in November over kickbacks from government contracts but rather than spending most of his time on that issue, Harper methodically laid out a policy a day during a campaign that ended up dispelling some of the doubts voters had about him in 2004. ?I felt almost from Day One that we were doing what we wanted to do, getting our message out, and the surprise for me from early on was that the Liberals didn't seem to be doing that,? Harper told reporters on his plane on Sunday, the final day of the campaign, as he flew to British Columbia.

To the very end, Martin insisted he was competitive, bearing in mind he recovered in 2004 to win a minority mandate -- though from a smaller deficit in the polls than he has now.

Majority government

?The result of the election has not yet been decided,? Martin told reporters in Vancouver on Sunday. ?There are still plenty of undecided voters ... we're going to win this election.? Two other parties, the separatist Bloc Quebecois and the leftist New Democratic Party, also were expected to win substantial numbers of seats, making it unlikely that either the Conservatives or the Liberals would win a majority government in this election.

Harper built his campaign on appealing to regular Canadians on the need to clean up government, cut the national sales tax, crack down on crime and cut waiting times for the publicly funded health system. Martin fought mainly on his record, particularly an economy running healthy budget and trade surpluses, and said at one point he thought the status quo was pretty good.