(Ottawa) The Liberal Party of Canada easily won the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Westmount and Winnipeg-South Center elections in Monday’s by-election.
Updated at 0:38
What there is to know
- By-elections were held in four constituencies across the country.
- The Liberal Party and Conservative Party retained their seats.
- The leader of the People’s Party, Maxime Bernier, bites the dust in Portage-Lisgar.
As expected, the Conservative Party managed to retain the other two districts where voters were invited to vote, namely Portage-Lisgar and Oxford. But victory was less convincing at this latest race in Ontario, which for several years was a Conservative stronghold.
At the Montreal Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Westmount race, victory was quickly confirmed for Liberal contestant Anna Gainey, daughter of former Montreal Canadiens player Bob Gainey. At the time of writing, Ms Gainey won nearly half of the vote (48.4%), while three candidates – Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault, new Democrat Jean-François Fillion and Conservative Mathew Kaminski – bid for the Around 14% of the votes competed for second place.
Ms Gainey, who was President of the Liberal Party of Canada and previously worked for ministers in Paul Martin’s former Liberal government, will therefore move into the House of Commons, succeeding Marc Garneau, the former Foreign Secretary who retired from politics in March .
At the Winnipeg South Centre, where a record 48 candidates ran for election, Liberal Ben Carr had no trouble winning. Mr Carr, the son of former Cabinet Secretary Jim Carr, who died last December, received nearly 52% of the vote as of this writing. Conservative candidate Damir Stipanovic finished a solid second with just 23.6% of the vote, while new Democrat Julia Riddell finished third with 17.8%.
In Manitoba’s other race for Portage-Lisgar, People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier bit the dust for the third time since his party’s founding in 2018. He garnered just 18.2% of the vote, well behind Conservative candidate Branden Leslie, who ran to victory with 63.6% of the vote. In the last federal election, the candidate of the People’s Party of Canada achieved the best result for his party in the country with 22% of the votes in this campaign.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada and losing candidate in Portage-Lisgar
The struggle was worst in the Oxford constituency. Conservative candidate Arpan Khanna was elected with 42.2% of the vote, closely followed by Liberal candidate David Hilderley, who won 36.4%. Incumbent MP for that race, Dave MacKenzie, caused an upset by endorsing the Liberal candidate, furious that his daughter Deb Tait lost the nominating session and the party dropped a candidate with little connection to the constituency.
The results of these by-elections should not call into question the forces available in the federal capital. A minority in the House of Commons, the Liberal Party now has 158 seats, the Conservative Party 117 seats, the Bloc Québécois 32 seats and the New Democratic Party 25 seats. The Greens have two seats and there are three independents.
More by-elections will follow
On Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced another July 24 by-election in Calgary-Heritage County, Alberta. That constituency has been vacant since Conservative MP Bob Benzen resigned last December. Mr. Trudeau did not call this by-election at the same time as Monday’s by-election due to recent provincial elections in Alberta.
Voters in Durham County, Ontario will also lose their MP by the end of the week. Former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole announced in the spring that he would resign at the end of the current session of Parliament on June 23. Mr. Trudeau must therefore call a by-election in this constituency in the coming weeks.
In a farewell speech last week in the House of Commons, Mr O’Toole strongly warned of the dangers of social media to Canadian democracy.
“We are becoming the chosen ones to judge our worth by the number of likes on social media, rather than the number of lives we change in the real world. Spectacle politics fuels polarization, displays of virtue replace discussion and far too often we use the House of Representatives to produce video clips rather than spark national debates,” Mr O’Toole said in a solemn tone.
“Social media didn’t build this great country, but they are starting to destroy its democracy,” he said.