Mail-in ballots could yet flip several key ridings

Liberals have razor-thin leads in eight of them

OTTAWA • Mail-in ballots will decide the final outcome in more than a dozen ridings across the country and it could be days before some candidates know if they’re going to be elected as MPS or not.

The ridings won’t be enough to deny Prime Minister Justin Trudeau his minority government, but they could weaken or strengthen his hand in the new Parliament.

Currently, Trudeau and the Liberals are leading in 158 seats across the country, most of those are settled, but in eight ridings the party is leading by a thin margin, with thousands of votes from mail-in ballots still needing to be counted.

In Alberta, as an example, the Liberals are ahead in Edmonton-centre, but Liberal candidate Randy Boissonnault has just a 136-vote lead over Conservative MP James Cummings, while 3,191 mail-in ballots remain to be counted.

In Kitchener-conestoga, the Liberals lead by 174 votes, with more than 2,000 mail-in ballots still to come. And in Sault Ste. Marie Liberal MP Terry Sheehan was holding onto the riding with a razor thin margin of just 41 votes over Conservative challenger Sonny Spina with a handful of polls and 1,963 mail-in ballots not yet recorded.

During the campaign, Mainstreet Research in conjunction with ipolitics, asked mail-in ballot voters how they voted to gauge party support. In Ontario, Liberals were on top among those voters, with 44 per cent of respondents who said they voted by mail saying they supported the Liberals.

In Alberta, the Liberals had a greater share of those mailin voters in the survey than the Conservatives, but Ndpers were most likely to have voted by mail at 38 per cent.

The Liberals were also holding onto narrow leads in Davenport in downtown Toronto, Hamilton Mountain, Fredericton, and the B.C. ridings of Vancouver Granville and Richmond Centre.

The Grits weren’t the only party waiting on mail-in votes to cement or erase leads. Conservative MP Marty Morantz was leading in the Winnipeg riding of Charleswood—st. James— Assiniboia—headingley, but by only 109 votes with more than 3,600 votes still to be counted from the mail-in ballots.

Mainstreet’s numbers from Manitoba, showed Liberals much more likely to vote by mail than Conservative voters.

The Conservatives had 119 ridings including Morantz’s seat in their column and the party had comfortable margins in almost all of them. In one of the party’s surprise upsets, Coast of Bays-central-notre Dame, where Conservative candidate Clifford Small was ahead of Liberal MP Scott Simms by 569 votes, there were more than 2,000 votes to be counted.

The NDP’S Lisa Marie Barron had a 989-vote lead in Nanaimo-ladysmith, beating the Conservative candidate and Green Party MP Paul Manly, but the riding had one of the highest levels of mail in ballots anywhere in the country, with 7,572 votes left to be tabulated.

In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois were narrowly ahead in two ridings; Troisrivières where they held a 48-vote lead over the Conservative and Brome-missisquoi where they had a 99 vote lead over the Liberals.

In both of those ridings there were more than 2,000 votes still waiting to be counted from the mail-in ballots.

The country saw an enormous surge in mail-in ballots with more than a million people choosing to cast their votes by mail, up from around 50,000 who voted that way in 2019. Counting those ballots is also more complicated than counting regular ballots and is expected to take several days.

The mail-in ballots have to go through a verification process before the actual ballots are counted, this includes ensuring that the person who requested a mail-in vote didn’t vote in person at a polling station.

Elections Canada spokesperson Diane Benson said that the verification process was happening on Tuesday and the actual counting of ballots would not start for most ridings until Wednesday morning.

She said depending on the number of ballots in a given riding it could take longer in some communities.

“There may be a few where the volume count was high, and it’s going to take time to do the verification and then to do the count, a few places could go into Thursday or Friday,” she said.

Elections Canada originally planned for as many as five million ballots to be cast by mail, but Benson said that number dropped as more people were vaccinated and Canadians became more comfortable voting in person.