Hours after Canadians went to bed disappointed by a Stanley Cup loss Monday night, the Conservatives scored a stunning byelection upset to win in the longtime Liberal stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul's.
Conservative candidate Don Stewart eked out the win by just 590 votes over Liberal Leslie Church in an early morning upset, yanking away a riding the governing Liberals have held for more than 30 years.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre demanded the prime minister call a snap election after what he described as a "shocking upset" on social media Tuesday morning.
"Here is the verdict: Trudeau can’t go on like this. He must call a carbon tax election now," Poilievre said on X.
Stewart trailed Church for hours overnight as poll workers slowly counted ballots that were stacked with independent candidates, thanks to a protest group trying to make a point about the first-past-the-post system.
Stewart tried to sound upbeat when he visited his campaign office around 11:30 p.m., but he didn't quite succeed as the polls showed his opponent in a steady lead.
"Let's not give it up," he said.
Both Stewart and Church had closed up their campaign parties hours before the final results, when it became clear the vote count was going to extend into the early morning hours.
The results flipped just before 4 a.m. when Tories jumped into the lead with just three polls left to be counted.
The results represent a massive victory for party Leader Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives, who haven't won a single seat in Toronto proper since 2011.
The race was considered a must-win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the loss is a massive blow that could trigger calls for him to step down after 11 years as Liberal leader.
The crushing defeat for the Liberals is a kick to a party that is already down in the polls.
Typically, when Conservatives do well in urban ridings, it's because the New Democrats have siphoned off support from left-wing voters, said Ginny Roth, a Conservative strategist who served as Poilievre's director of communications during his leadership race.
That wasn't true for Monday's byelection, when the Liberals and Conservatives went head-to-head and the NDP candidate garnered only 11 per cent of the votes.
But if the same holds true for other seats across the country, it could change the strategic dynamics of the next election, Roth said Tuesday.
"It's a really buoyant, exciting prospect for Conservatives who, I think, now can point to a very broad coalition of support," she said.
The contest was Stewart's first election. The financial executive has close ties to the Conservative party as a longtime organizer and a former colleague of Jenni Byrne, an informal Poilievre adviser.
Toronto-St. Paul's, in the city's midtown area, includes some of Toronto's wealthiest addresses as well as an above-average number of renters, and one of the largest concentrations of Jewish voters in the country.
Carolyn Bennett, the former Liberal cabinet minister whose resignation in January triggered this byelection, won the seat nine times for the Liberals, and by more than 20 percentage points every time except once.
But the Liberal campaign was challenged by a cranky electorate that lost patience with Trudeau amid soaring inflation, unaffordable housing and a rise in hate crimes since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Conservatives appealed to the riding's Jewish community during the race, urging them to vote for the Tory candidate to send a message to Trudeau about what they describe as silence in the face of a rise in antisemitism.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 25, 2024.
With files from Mia Rabson and Stephanie Taylor in Ottawa and Sheila Reid in Toronto
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The mainstream news isn't
The mainstream news isn't dwelling on it, but yesterday's electoral upset is almost too apt to be true. Many Liberal supporters and indeed many current and former Liberal MPs were and still are deeply disappointed by Trudeau's decision to abandon the party's promise to make every vote count. That disappointment is specifically what gave rise to the Longest Ballot Committee, whose slate of candidates in Toronto-St. Paul's collectively earned 1,068 votes, certainly enough to have otherwise enabled the Liberals to hold on to the seat. The Committee was determined to send Trudeau a message, and by god so they have. They've effectively just hammered a wedge deeper into the heart of his party while promising to field even more independent candidates in the general election to come.
Chickens, welcome home.
I find your perspective
I find your perspective interesting and worth pondering even thought I support the Liberals.
For me, the bottom line though is whether that issue is worth aiding and abetting the Conservatives as you point out it might have there?
Or, if the Liberals were to adopt ranked voting, would it help or hinder the right wing power play we see unfolding? ie. a more progressive government to survive.
I am guessing that since more progressive votes, eg. Monday Liberals, NDP, and Green easily surpassed the Reform Party votes who won, that a ranked ballot system might serve their own interests.
Still, any change like our new dental care plan or capital gains tax revision makes a certain percentage of voters cranky because Conservative opinion writers with a big platform in the Nat. Post aid P.P. to pile on as to why it is "bad" or "broken". I welcome anyone who knows much more to weigh win.
Michael, you write:
Michael, you write:
"For me, the bottom line though is whether that issue [our country's democratic deficit and need for electoral reform] is worth aiding and abetting the Conservatives as you point out it might have there?"
Where exactly did I say that? ...or if in fact it really were the Longest Ballot Committee's intention to aid and abet the Conservatives, why on earth did it field a huge slate of independent candidates to run against them instead? Why not simply support and vote for the Conservatives and encourage others to do so as well?
You've missed the point. So I'll put it another way. There's nothing contradictory or paradoxical about supporting both the Liberal party and the principle of fair representation at the same time. Indeed it was Liberal party members themselves, after years of internal consensus-building, who drafted and adopted the party's promise to make 2015 the last election using first past the post. The party intended by this that every Canadian would thenceforth be able to vote for and receive their representation of choice, free from the possibility that doing so might only split the ballot and end up helping the candidate they like the least.
Unfortunately, the party then chose a leader who had no intention of following through. Trudeau shrewdly used the promise to help him get elected PM, and then used the power of his new office to break the promise his party had made. He moreover ensured that there'd be no further consideration of electoral reform in the party so long as he is in charge.
Not to suggest that Trudeau is alone among Liberals in his priorities. The reason it took so long for the party to hammer out a consensus on electoral reform is that there have always been some Liberals who see no reason why Canadians should wish to vote for anyone else. Such Liberals are fine with an electoral system like ours that forces Canadians who prefer other parties to vote strategically for the Liberals instead if they don't want their votes to help Conservatives get elected. Indeed such Liberals are joined with most Conservatives in this view, that Canadians would be better served if there were but just one party to vote for: their own.
The Longest Ballot Committee objects to this situation. It believes that Canadians are ill-served by an electoral system that blackmails them into choosing between two parties, neither of which they support. The Committee's intention, earlier this week, was to remind the Liberal party of the downside to their leader's self-serving path. If the Liberal party wishes to continue denying Canadians fair access to due representation, what's to stop us from running to represent ourselves?
Mr. Erland, may I remind you
Mr. Erland, may I remind you that your self-indulgent, idealized notion of voting as just another form of personal expression regardless of political realities has NOT had the desired effect, to say the least.
In fact it's obviously an example of several sayings that line up with the the more paranoid NDP branch of progressivism--- the perfect being the enemy of the good, holier than thou, and the best one--the NARCISSISM of small differences.
Wouldn't you say it's time to climb down off your high horse and start talking about uniting the left again? Where did that discussion GO anyway; it used to come up regularly and would give us the numbers we need to save ourselves in one fell swoop.
I've thought more of the NDP since they signed that agreement with the Liberals, but not how they've kept bashing them as if the Liberals didn't ALSO sign the agreement. Very churlish, i.e. very "conservative," not unlike the aforementioned punitive take on the whole PR issue.
I have never understood why people become so irrational when it comes to elections and/or government; they become petulant children who seem completely unable to imagine the complexities that face people once they're ACTUALLY in charge, even though we see it over and over, including with the NDP provincially. They also simply refuse to accept the reality that elections come down to numbers and that politics is indeed the "art of the possible" whether they like it or not.
Speaking of that, the Liberals are the natural governing party of this country, so become the tall poppies to be cut down by competitors in the horse race that, annoying and demeaning though it is, is still what captures ever-more-fractious human attention enough to participate after a fashion in our democracy, such as it is. But the competitors have fallen in with the extremist Reform Party who swallowed the former generally progressive conservatives whole; then social media changed the game entirely and Harper's "boys in short pants" grabbed the controller early on, using it to vilify the Liberals via their new leader, bearer of the Trudeau legacy, infamous in the West (from whence they came) which made him a whipping boy if there ever was one.
He's just a man, but he still represents the evolved liberal philosophy that underpins democracy itself, and so should be supported accordingly, by all progressives.
We need to grow up.
Justin Ling's brilliant
Justin Ling's brilliant coverage of the Longest Ballot Committee's achievement in Toronto-St. Paul's:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/justin-ling-justin-trudeau-...
Good job. And great timing.
Good job. And great timing. How to "read the room!"
Or did the "Longest Ballot Committee" just show ONE of the main problems with their phantom ideal of "making every vote count," the good old reliable NDP vote-splitting at work when we least needed it? Not to mention the problem of the left wing generally of being "too precious by half," again, ESPECIALLY in the do-or-die context of the current political reality, never more BINARY.
Oh, and the "punishment" of Trudeau for changing his mind after being elected, because he rightly decided such an electoral sea change would probably be too divisive, isn't that impulse textbook conservative, just more covertly so? More of the iron fist in the velvet glove?
Maybe the very clever "Longest Ballot Committee" should reconsider their political affiliation altogether.....
I don't believe Trudeau
I don't believe Trudeau "changed his mind" on a key promise. I believe he and his party hacks never wanted it in the first place and campaigned on it only because it was a vote magnet large enough margins to push them over the top. The slow walk on proportionality for two years, and the dropping of the file in the end proves it. If they reay meant to enact PR to begin with they'd have started a national consultation campaign early, perhaps led by citizens themselves in an arm's length Citizens Assembly mandated to study and make recommendations for a referendum question.
That cynicism was played out quite a few more times on several files, demonstrated by breathless pronouncements followed by months of foot dragging, fence sitting and shoving the file aside. Four years to enact a simple carbon tax? Gimme a break.
There was also the mistreatment of Jody Wilson Raybould -- my MP -- very early in the Lib's first term in a perfectly illustrated textbook example of corporate donor protectionism by party elites over principles and integrity.
That, in my view, was why voters handed Trudeau multiple minority governments, unfortunately with the NDP who, it turns out, were incapable of bold leadership and who are as locked into partisanship over principle as any other party, a handful of individual NDP MPs excepted.
Trudeau had his shing moments, pandemic action being right at the top. But it took great pressure concerning life and death to firce him and some of his best cabinet personalities to lead with bold action. Today, they are too tired.
The irony here is that a workable proportionate voting system would have permitted the true leaders in centre-left parties to form a coalition government and more easily bypass (or have more power to negotiate with or overlook) party executives whose very identities are subsumbed by partisan hackery.
Today, without proportionality and with leaders who have a history of timidity and who are afraid of policy boldness even when it is the best antidote to their diluted electability, the best recourse is to have at least one leadership campaign. Replacing a drama teacher with an economist or scientist with deep seated credibility and a willingness to come out swinging on climate, housing and social justice, and to poke party partisans in the eye over partnering with fellow House travellers on other teams to lead the nation into a brighter future based on principle and sound policy -- or at least into a full adaptation and survival mode -- would offer the voters a very solid alternative ti the angry Conservative narrative so empty of realistic policies.
Note that the Conservatives
Note that the Conservatives won this "Liberal stronghold" by a narrow margin. That margin is easily won back. Winning isn't as important aa reading the electorate's hearts and minds and maintaining the riding with positive, proactive intentions and good leadership.
One can only hope that the
One can only hope that the Liberals get the message from this loss, which was only by a thing margin. Justine Trudeau needs to step down, his time has come to exit as leader and inject new blood and thinking into the Liberal party. Failure to do so will be the demise of the Liberal party.
To the younger generation of voters who are concerned about climate change, conservatives are not the right choice if you are truly concerned about climate change. The conservative party won't acknowledge that climate change is real and second, oil & gas are in their back pockets. Vote wisely... don't be fooled by Pierre "snake oil salesman" Poilievre axe the tax disinformation propaganda. Filling you fossil fuel vehicle in Canada is ranked 3rd cheapest in the world and not a major factor in the cost of living. You are being dupped by a conman and snake oil salesman.
Why are so many younger
Why are so many younger generation voters willing to give up their so called principles on climate change and so on to sock it to Trudeau by voting for an angry charlatan? Stated concerns about housing affordability and inflation only explain a certain selfish tendency, not their ability to wilfully ignore planetary demise or to register their vote with a party with no experience in the very principles so many youth have expressed before. Even a temporary protest vote could lead to two or more terms with a disastrous government.
Younger generation spokespeople need to explain their reasoning, or to explain why they don't have a solid rationale for voting for a ragemeister other than to punish someone else.
That mindset will lead to deep youth voter regret after four or more years of Poilievre -- unless a good portion of them tyrn out to actually support him. I've said before, if that's the case, then Denmark would look like a much better place to live with every passing year of Conservarive rule.
Beautifully stated Alex.
Beautifully stated Alex. There is still time to awaken the youth vote which is crucial. But anger, much of it misplaced, superficial understanding of issues, and the Conservative misinformation campaigns are allowing the Cons. to prey on the youth vote at the expense of even rudimentary understanding of who P.P. and his pro fossil fuel party is and what he and they stand for on so many issues which is 180 degrees opposite most of their principles.
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