Despite gaining 9 seats the Tories lost 8 behind them to the Liberals Democrats and one even to Labour.

In 1841 the Liberals lost office to the Conservative Party under Sir Robert Peel, but their period in opposition was short, because the Conservatives split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, a free trade issue, and a faction known as the Peelites ( but not Peel himself, who died soon after ), defected to the Liberal side.

Following success as the successor to the Whig party, the party's share of the popular vote plummeted after the First World War as it lost votes to the new Labour party and fractured into groups such as the National and Coalition Liberals.

Apart from this, when no party has had a majority, minority governments normally have been formed with one or more opposition parties agreeing to vote for the legislation governments need to function, as the Labour government of James Callaghan formed a coalition with the Liberals in 1977 when it lost its narrow majority gained at the October 1974 election.

While the Liberals lost several seats, they still had 111 more seats than the Tories, enabling them to dominate the Canadian House of Commons.

Many Liberals criticised the Fraser years as " a decade of lost opportunity ," on deregulation of the Australian economy and other issues.

He lost his seat in the 1911 general election, which saw the Conservatives defeat his Liberals.

The Liberals lost 118 seats ( leaving them with only 40 ) and their vote count fell by over a million.

( The independent Liberal parliamentary leadership was briefly taken over by the unknown Donald Maclean until Asquith, who had lost his seat like other leading Liberals, returned to the House at a by-election ).

With the emergence of new parties, the Liberals lost its dominant position.

The Liberals increased their large majority mostly at the expense of the NDP, and the Tories under Joe Clark lost many seats and remained in fifth place, but Clark was elected in Calgary Centre in the middle of Alliance country, so the overall political landscape was not significantly changed.

The Stanfield-led Progressive Conservatives lost the 1974 election to the Pierre Trudeau-led Liberals.

Clark's reputation as a leader had taken a beating when, as Prime Minister, he carelessly lost a non-confidence motion over his minority government's budget in December 1979, leading to the fall of his government ; the PCs subsequently lost the federal election held two months later when Trudeau rescinded his announced retirement, and returned to lead the Liberals to a majority.

The Liberals lost 27 seats, including several high-profile cabinet ministers, and Trudeau announced his intention to step down as party leader.

The Liberals lost 13 seats to Labor, led by Steve Bracks, at the 1999 election, most of them in regional centres such as Ballarat and Bendigo.

The Liberals won re-election and Labor lost its slim majority.

In the 1979 election, Sauvé won the riding of Laval-des-Rapides, but the Liberals lost their majority in the commons to the Progressive Conservative Party, and Sauvé thus lost her cabinet position.

The Liberals lost the federal election, of May, 1979 to a minority Conservative government led by Joe Clark.

The Liberals lost power in the 1895 general election and for ten years were in opposition.

By this time, Asquith had become very unpopular with the public ( as Lloyd George was perceived to have " won the war " by displacing him ) and, along with most leading Liberals, lost his seat in the 1918 elections, at which the Liberals split into Asquith and Lloyd George factions.

Asquith again lost his seat in the 1924 election held after the fall of the Labour government — at which the Liberals were reduced to the status of a minor party with only 40 or so MPs.

The Liberals won, and Mackenzie remained prime minister until the 1878 election when Macdonald's Conservatives returned to power with a majority government.

While Disraeli's government survived until the December general election, the initiative had passed to the Liberals, who were returned to power with a majority of 170.

In the general election of 1880 Disraeli's Conservatives were defeated by Gladstone's Liberals, in large part owing to the uneven course of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

David Lloyd George adopted a programme at the 1929 general election entitled We Can Conquer Unemployment !, although by this stage the Liberals had declined to third-party status.

The Liberals won a large majority in the 1880 election.

In the 1918 general election Lloyd George, " the Man Who Won the War ", led his coalition into another khaki election, and won a sweeping victory over the Asquithian Liberals and the newly emerging Labour Party.

Ramsay MacDonald was forced into a snap election in 1924, and although his government was defeated, he achieved his objective of virtually wiping the Liberals out as many more radical voters now moved to Labour whilst moderate middle-class Liberal voters concerned about socialism moved to the Conservatives.

In the 1929 general election he made a final bid to return the Liberals to the political mainstream, with an ambitious programme of state stimulation of the economy called We Can Conquer Unemployment !, largely written for him by the Liberal economist John Maynard Keynes.

Soon, however, the Liberals faced another divisive crisis when a National Government was proposed to fight the 1931 general election with a mandate for tariffs.

In the 1935 general election, just 17 Liberal MPs were elected, along with Lloyd George and three followers as " independent Liberals ".

In 1950, the general election saw the Liberals return just nine MPs.

Another general election was called in 1951, and the Liberals were left with just six MPs in parliament ; all but one of them were aided by the fact that the Conservatives refrained from fielding candidates in those constituencies.

In the October 1974 general election the Liberals slipped back slightly and the Labour government won a wafer-thin majority.

The new party and the Liberals quickly formed an alliance, which for a while polled as high as 50 % in the opinion polls and appeared capable of winning the next general election.

In the 2005 general election, the Liberal Democrats elected 62 MPs to the House of Commons, a far cry from the days when the Liberals had just 5 MPs and Liberalism as a political force had seemed moribund.

In the 2005 election it won 18 out of 179 seats in the Folketing and became a junior partner in coalition with the Liberals.

In the 1997 federal election, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's Liberals endured a bitter defeat to the PCs and NDP in many ridings as a result of unpopular cuts to unemployment benefits for seasonal workers, as well as closures of several Canadian Forces Bases, the refusal to honour a promise to rescind the Goods and Services Tax, cutbacks to provincial equalization payments, health care, post-secondary education and regional transportation infrastructure such as airports, fishing harbours, seaports, and railways.

After United Fruit bought out Cuyamal, Sam Zemurray, a strong supporter of the Liberal Party, left the country and the Liberals were short on cash by the 1932 general election.

In the Khaki Election of 1900, nationalist concern with the Boer War meant that the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies gained a majority of Scottish seats for the first time, although the Liberals regained their ascendancy in the next election.

The election resulted in a hung parliament with the Tories having the most votes but Labour having slightly more seats, and failed attempts by Heath to form a coalition with the Liberals led to the resignation of his government and the return of Harold Wilson as prime minister of a minority Labour government, which gained a three-seat majority at a second election later in the year.

When Laurier led the Liberals to victory in the 1896 election, 14-year-old Louis relayed the election returns from the telephone in his father's store.