Conservatives lead in northwest riding
Liberals look unlikely to win new hotly contested inner- city district
The new riding of Calgary Confederation was going down to the wire Monday night, but Conservative candidate Len Webber appeared headed toward victory.
Webber had opened up a lead over Liberal Matt Grant, but Grant’s camp had not conceded as of press time.
“We’re feeling positive. There are still a lot of polls to count and a lot of them are in communities we’ve spent a lot of time in,” Grant said.
The inner- city district is one of the places the Liberals hoped to win their first seat in the city since Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, won a majority in 1968.
While the Liberals under Trudeau will form a majority, it was still an open question whether the voters of Calgary Confederation will have a member of Parliament on the government benches or in opposition.
At Webber’s campaign office, supporters cheered as results favouring their candidate came in, but the overall mood was tempered by the Conservatives’ relegation to the Official Opposition.
The contest in Calgary Confederation pitted Webber, a veteran of provincial politics, against Matt Grant, a lawyer and political newcomer. NDP candidate Kirk Heuser, a former TV journalist, was headed for a third- place finish behind them.
The riding was created through recently redrawn riding boundaries — carved out of the former ridings of Calgary- Nose Hill, Calgary Centre- North and Calgary West — and it had no incumbent MP.
Polls taken in mid- September placed Grant and Webber neckandneck earlier in the campaign, making it one of two or three Calgary ridings where the Liberals felt they had an opportunity to break the electoral stranglehold the Conservatives and their forerunners in the Reform party and the Canadian Alliance have had in the city for decades.
Webber, 54, is an entrepreneur, administrator and former tradesman who won the Conservative nomination last year after leaving provincial politics. Webber was elected as the Progressive Conservative MLA for the riding of Calgary-Foothills in 2004, but left the PC caucus to sit as an Independent in 2014 in protest of then- premier Alison Redford’s leadership.
Grant, 32, said during the campaign that he had no intention of being a placeholder candidate for the Liberals and said he has spent the past two years campaigning on the belief he had a legitimate chance of winning.
Like Grant, Heuser was hoping to make an electoral breakthrough for his party: the NDP has never won a federal seat in Calgary. Heuser, 48, took a leave from his job as communications director for the Pembina Institute to run and was a veteran TV journalist prior to that.
“It’s not the result we wanted to see but I’m very proud of the way we ran our campaign and I’m proud of the platform we ran on,” said Heuser, adding NDP promised ambitious programs like national child care and pharmacare.
“These are essential programs for people.”
Natalie Odd of the Green party and Kevan Hunter of the Marxist-Leninist party rounded out the field of candidates.