Surrey riding goes Liberal in federal vote
Elsewhere, Liberals win two byelections; Tories take one
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals scored a byelection upset Monday, snatching the British Columbia riding of South Surrey-White Rock away from the Conservatives.
Gordie Hogg won the riding with 47 per cent of the vote, five percentage points ahead of Conservative Kerry-Lynne Findlay, a former Harper-era cabinet minister who represented a neighbouring riding for one term before being defeated in 2015.
It’s the first time in 70 years that a Liberal has represented any portion of the riding, the boundaries of which have changed a number of times.
Hogg’s squeaker victory marks the second upset win for the governing Liberals in as many months. They stole a riding in Quebec’s nationalist heartland away from the Tories in a byelection in October.
For Andrew Scheer, the outcome marks the second byelection loss since he became Conservative leader in May.
In three other federal byelections Monday, the Liberals retained safe seats in Newfoundland and Labrador and Toronto, while the Conservatives held onto one of their safe seats in Saskatchewan.
But only in South Surrey-White Rock was the result ever in any doubt.
The riding was left vacant after Conservative MP Dianne Watts resigned to run for the leadership of the B.C. Liberals. Watts, a high-profile former mayor of Surrey, narrowly won the seat in 2015 with 44 per cent of the vote, fewer than 1,500 votes ahead of the Liberal contender.
Hogg, a former mayor of White Rock and a former B.C. MLA, essentially reversed the 2015 result, eking out a narrow victory of less than 1,500 votes over Findlay.
Scheer, who campaigned with Findlay twice, had billed the contest as a chance for voters to send “a mid-term signal, that what the Liberals have been doing for Canadians hasn’t been working.”
There was some solace for Scheer in the safe Tory riding of Battlefords-Lloydminster in Saskatchewan, where Conservative Rosemarie Falk captured 69.6 per cent of the vote — more than 55 points ahead of any of her competitors and an eight-point improvement over veteran Conservative MP Gerry Ritz, who had held the riding for 20 years before retiring last summer.
In Toronto’s Scarborough-Agincount, meanwhile, Liberal Jean Yip captured 49.4 per cent of the vote to hold the riding left vacant by the untimely death of her husband, Arnold Chan, in September. Conservative Dasong Zou took 40.5 per cent while the NDP contender took just five per cent.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, Churence Rogers easily retained Bonavista-Burin-Trinity, the safest Liberal seat in the country. The former head of the province’s federation of municipalities captured 69.2 per cent of the vote.