OTTAWA, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- Justin Trudeau avoided becoming the first Canadian prime minister since 1930 to lose power after governing with a first-term majority.
Following the 43rd general election, Trudeau's Liberal Party will hold 157 seats in the 338-seat House while the Conservative Party, which received a higher percentage of the popular vote and will remain the official opposition, won 121 seats as of early Tuesday morning.
"Canadians rejected division and negativity, and voted in favor of a progressive agenda and strong action on climate change," Trudeau told supporters at a victory rally in Montreal.
However, Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer put the Liberals "on notice" that when their government falls, the Conservatives "will be ready and we will win."
Polling throughout the 40-day national campaign had the Liberals and Conservatives virtually tied for public support in an electorate that both punished and rewarded parties along geographical lines.
Trudeau will govern Canada without any Liberal Members of Parliament (MPs) in two Canadian provinces: Alberta, where his party lost its four seats, and Saskatchewan, where veteran MP and former cabinet minister Ralph Goodale was defeated by a Conservative.
The left-of-center New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP), which in 2011 won a historic 59 seats -- or the majority of the 78 seats allocated to the French-speaking province of Quebec -- was left with a single seat in Quebec in this year's election.
Quebec voters instead favored the nationalist Bloc Quebecois, a party established in 1991 to advocate for the province's separation from Canada, which won 32 seats and will supplant the NDP as the third party in the House of Commons.
Former federal Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, who leads the People's Party of Canada, also lost his seat in Quebec, leaving his right-wing party without representation in the Canadian Parliament.
The Green Party, which was expected to receive more of an electoral boost earlier in the campaign, was left with three seats, including leader Elizabeth May's.
Canada's House of Commons will also have one elected Independent MP. Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada's first indigenous attorney general whom Trudeau removed from the post after she refused to intervene in the criminal prosecution of Canadian construction and engineering giant SNC-Lavalin on fraud and corruption charges, was re-elected in a British Columbia riding she first won four years ago as a Liberal.
