Lambton-kent-middlesex remains a Tory riding

Voters in Lambton-kent-middlesex stuck with Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives in one of two Ontario byelections Thursday, both won by the PCS, including the Southwestern Ontario contest by a wide margin.

Steve Pinsonneault, a Chatham-kent civic politician and businessman, amassed more than 15,000 votes to handily take the Lambton-kent-middlesex seat by a better than two-to-one margin over his nearest rival, Liberal Cathy Burghardt-jesson, the mayor of Lucan-biddulph.

The New Democrats, the Opposition party at Queen's Park, ran a distant third, with just under 3,000 votes for candidate Kathryn Shailer.

“I'm overwhelmed, I'm not going to lie to you,” Pinsonneault, 61, said as his victory crystallized, keeping the riding — a vast rural seat straddling portions of two counties and Chatham-kent — firmly in the Tory fold.

The byelection was triggered by the resignation last fall of 12-year former MPP Monte Mcnaughton, a Ford cabinet minister who bowed out of provincial politics to work in the private sector.

The PCS also prevailed in Thursday's other byelection, in Milton, where the race was much tighter with PC candidate Zee Hamid fending off Liberal Galen Naidoo Harris by just more than 2,400 votes to keep the district in PC hands. Like Lambton-kent-middlesex, it was the resignation of another Ford cabinet minister, Parm Gill, that created that vacancy. Gill left provincial politics to pursue a federal Conservative nomination.

The byelection results won't affect the balance of power at Queen's Park, where Ford holds a commanding majority. Both races were seen as early acid tests for new leaders of the other two main parties, the NDP under Merit Stiles and the Liberals — still without enough seats to qualify as an official party in the legislature — under Bonnie Crombie.

Pinsonneault, a Thamesville small businessman, jumped to an early lead in the first wave of results and never looked back. He won just under 57 per cent of the vote, to nearly 23 per cent for Burghardt-jesson and 11 per cent for Shailer.

Barely one-third of eligible voters cast ballots, with the byelection coming two years before the next general election.

Noting he knocked on more than 14,000 doors in every community in the far-flung riding, which is the same size as Prince Edward Island, Pinsonneault credited his campaign team.

“I definitely put the work into it, but you can't do something like this without a great team in place,” said Pinsonneault, who's been a Chatham-kent civic councillor for 17 years.

Mcnaughton was on hand at the Florence Community Centre after the byelection to introduce the riding's Mpp-elect.

One issue in the riding sure to come up early for its new MPP will be a proposal to allow a dormant landfill and waste processing site near Dresden to be expanded into a massive 24/7 operation, taking in construction debris from across the province for recycling and disposal.

Pinsonneault is on record opposing the project as a civic politician, but said he's personally opposed to it as well.