Liberals, Conservatives take 2 seats apiece in 4 federal byelections
CBC
Voters in four federal ridings are sticking with the status quo, returning two Liberals and two Conservatives to Parliament after byelections in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.
CBC News projects Liberals Ben Carr in Winnipeg South Centre and Anna Gainey in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount and Conservatives Arpan Khanna in Oxford and Branden Leslie in Portage-Lisgar will win their respective races.
That means the party standings in the House of Commons are unchanged after Monday's vote.
The four seats in question have long been considered safe for the parties that currently hold them.
If any of these ridings had changed hands, it would have been a major upset.
But the results may serve as a barometer reading on how voters in four geographically diverse ridings perceive the current state of affairs and the leaders of Canada's two major political parties.
While national polls say support for the Liberal government has slumped after eight years in power, Trudeau's candidates handily won in two seats — and came closer than expected in a third.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's candidate in the rural Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar beat back a challenge from Maxime Bernier, the leader of the far-right People's Party, but the Conservative contender, Damir Stipanovic, in a Winnipeg-area seat that has gone Tory before floundered in Monday's vote.
The result in Oxford, a southwestern Ontario riding near London, was also closer than some Conservative party operatives had expected with Liberal candidate David Hilderley registering a vote share not seen by that party in a long time.
As of 12:50 a.m. ET, Khanna had 42.5 per cent of the vote compared to 36.5 per cent for Hilderley.
The seat has had a conservative-leaning MP for the last 70 years except for a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when the right-of-centre vote was split between the Progressive Conservative and Reform/Canadian Alliance parties.
Longtime Conservative MP Dave MacKenzie triggered the byelection when he stepped down in January.
His daughter Deb Tait ran for the party's nomination and lost to Khanna, a lawyer who previously ran for the party in Brampton, Ont. — a result that prompted accusations by Tait of wrongdoing, which the party has denied.
Tait, a Woodstock city-county councillor, claimed the party favoured her rival and she raised questions about voter ID verification during the nomination race.
This First Person column is the experience of Shannon Flaman, who lives in Red Deer, Alta. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
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