Though I’ll be posting updates, I’m not going to liveblog what you can readily access online or on air, but the comments are open for your links, reaction and local reports. Just don’t go breaking any laws, though by the looks of things…

… Elections Canada has better things to do than track down surly beavers.
However, as traffic will be heavy tonight, PLEASE avoid tying up server resources with one-liners, chat, expletives, and whatnot.
Game on!
And in these waning hours, one final pitch from Gaia to the voters of southern Saskatchewan –

Only your vote can save the planet from global warming!
Update: Looks like Dizzy Lizzy picked a bad day to go carbon free.
My goodness, a couple of blog sites are getting slammed tonight. (Try not to hit refresh too often, ok?)
And in other breaking news – SDA still up, Elections Canada still down.
Lusers.
Methinks it looks like Karlheinz Schreiber picked a bad day to go midday cocktail free.
One we’ve all been waiting for – GARTH TURNER DEFEATED
Oh! – and to all my deluded Liberal blogging friends living east of Manitoba – I told you so.

Via Climbing Out Of The Dark – “Now you wouldn’t think of Pallister Saskatchewan as the hotbed of “progressive” voting ideas, but CPAC just happened to catch the Greens and Liberals in action.”

Make your prediction in the comments – to make my job easier, please list the parties in alphabetical order (there are 308 seats in total):
BQ
Conservatives
Green
Liberal
NDP
Other/Independent
Bonus: Predict the popular vote for the party winning the most seats. (ie: Liberal – 30%) The bonus question will come into play should no commentor predict the seat distribution accurately enough to declare a clear winner.
Rules: one prediction per commentor and you must provide a valid email address. No email entries will be accepted.
For the person who comes closest in their prediction (after election results are declared final), I’ll send a $25 donation to the charity of your choice – $50 if your prediction is perfect.
In event of a tie, the comment time-stamped earliest will be declared the winner.
This thread will be declared closed at 4pm (Eastern) on Tuesday.

If anyone out there knows of sites liveblogging tomorrow’s election returns from outside Canadian territory, drop an email to kate-at-katewerk.com so that I may denounce them.
Update:
The Surly Beaver
Allow me to be the first to denounce this rodentious nefariousity!

Last chance to make your own Stephane Dion election sign!

And Dion, over at Bourque tonight.

Add to that comments from one of Canada’s top media personalities, who told Bourque tonight, “if I were a member of the Greens, if i were a candidate for the Greens, I would see her as a traitor, how could i possibly think of her as someone who wants to grow the Greens. She is simply behaving as an agent for the liberals”.

Pierre’s commentary has been expanding in detail all day. Make of it what you will.
I will say that I’ve noticed an uncharacteristic silence in recent hours from certain quarters.

All eyes remain fixed on the TorStar newsroom as we await the decision of the editorial board….

Now, a major motion picture!

“Harper ready to give us the squeeze. Tells Canadians to tighten their belts as U.S. financial collapse looms” (Ottawa Sun, December 21, 2007).

In the immortal words of John Travolta – “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin alive, stayin alive.”
In an echo of this memorable moment, this morning Stephane Dion is hard at work ensuring his meltdown before CTV Halifax remains in the news cycle, where it will spark curiousity among those who may not have yet heard about the incident.
Then, there’s the other problem – the shattering of the “fourth wall” and the reaction of journalists in certain quarters. There is outrage among LIberal friendly media that one of their own has had the audacity – the audacity! – to actually broadcast the unvarnished truth.
This, you see, is inappropriate.
That outrage has less to do with what happened to Dion than it does the fact that Canadians just caught a glimpse of how this business operates, and they don’t like it. It’s a “gotcha” moment all right, but this time it’s the media with their pants down. The restarts, the admission that ATV had first agreed to bury it before succumbing to sober second thought – that’s too much information.
For as hundreds have already pointed out across the blogosphere over the night, the very suggestion that Stephen Harper would have been afforded equal protection under the circumstances is laughable. The tape would have led the national newscasts, political analysts at the ready to drive the point home, pollsters already tasked with gauging the reaction of the electorate.
If broadcasting the Liberal leader’s performance before a running camera is a breach of journalistic ethics, I wonder what they’ll say about Greg Weston’s teleprompter-bites-man story?

“Thank you to welcome me in the chamber of commerce of one of the most successful city of Canada and certainly the most resilient Halifax,” Dion began ad libbing as he waited for the teleprompter.
Thanking the person who introduced him and saying a word about local Liberal MP Scott Brison, who provided a warm-up act, should not have been too tricky for a prospective prime minister.
“Thank you very much, um … Thank you. Uh, and thank you also. Thank you, Valerie. I think exactly like … I will speak with my heart, okay?”
“Thank you Valerie. Thank you so much because what you have as an agenda is at the core of a plan that Scotch, um, Scott has shown, a plan that want development and for the next generations as well, build on the economy and environment together.”
The teleprompter finally operational, the Liberal leader reads the rehearsed script, decrying Stephen Harper and telling the crowd why Stephane Dion should be the next prime minister.

He reported verbatim! This is not fair!
Update; What would we do without CBC campaign aides?

Well that’s interesting because we hear about [Dion’s plan] every single day,” said the CBC’s Julie Van Dusen, who is covering the election.
“It’s … about meeting the premiers, it’s about creating infrastructure jobs to kick-start a slowdown in the economy. It’s about his $1 billion fund that he has for the manufacturing sector in case they want to tap into it.”

h/t the Rat
Update: The launch of the Dion Excuse Platform.
Welcome Hotair readers, where this comment captures the essence of the matter perfectly;

“Hilarious! The ultimate softball question – where one gets to use perfect hindsight to flog the predecessor – left this dolt speechless.”

The Gormley show will be televised on CPAC today. Yours truly is scheduled to make an appearance via phone, but we shall see.
I’m hoping he has the Chernenkoffs booked.

Rae maintained Canadians really won’t know the true state of the nation’s books until a Liberal government takes power. But he too made an interesting concession to the impact of severe economic turbulence.
The Liberal Green Shift carbon-tax plan, said Rae, could also face a delayed implementation.
“Any government coming in has to take circumstances into account, but the direction is very clear,” said Rae.

Steve Janke asks a good question;

If the Green Shift is truly revenue neutral for the government, then why the delay? If the Green Shift is supposed to help most Canadians, then why the delay?

*

“Never will an election have posed to Canadians so starking choice.”
via

Yes, I thought it was an interesting comment, too.

Open thread for your predictions, commentary and reaction.
My vote for notable quote;

“A lot of you remember the tragedy of 9/11”

Reader Mississauga Matt asks – “A lot?”

eh… have any of your bright lights considered pointing out to Canadians that the Prime Minister is a frickin’ ECONOMIST??? and that as such, he perhaps has a better understanding of the relative risks facing our economy than say, oh, I don’t know… a sociology professor?
Update – part of a release that just landed on my desk;

Economist vs. Sociologist

Prime Minister Harper has a graduate degree in economics; Stephane Dion is a European-trained professor of sociology.

Prime Minister Harper has a proven track record of cutting taxes and balancing the budget; Stephane Dion is proposing billions of dollars in carbon taxes and reckless new spending.

Stephane Dion still hasn’t paid off his leadership debt, missing two years worth of repayment and reporting deadlines. If he can’t manage his own finances, should he be trusted to manage Canada’s?

The last one should be a campaign ad.
SDA gets results!

Via Dirty Harry;

I couldn’t believe CNN did this. After it was over, The Hot Little Number I Call Mrs. Harry and I stared at each other, jaws open, like we were watching Bigfoot pedal by on a unicycle.

Uh, oh….

…over a quarter of Stephane Dion’s speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2005 was plagiarized directly from a 2004 speech given to the U.S. Senate committee chaired by none other than…..John McCain.

Time for a PBS poll to go horribly wrong.
Bonus link! – “The Wright Stuff”. (h/t Joe B.)