Surprise Conservative by-election victory increases pressure on Trudeau to resign

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Don Stewart did the unthinkable: he won the riding of Toronto-St. Paul is for the conservatives. This is the first time the Conservatives have won the riding since 1988 and they did so in spectacular fashion.

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Stewart received 15,555 votes, or 42.1 per cent of all ballots cast, compared to Liberal candidate Leslie Church’s 14,965 or 40.5 per cent of votes.

The counting of votes was delayed due to the single ballot which saw 84 candidates registered. This made counting each vote, a process still done by hand without electronic counting machines, incredibly slow.

The polling stations closed their doors Monday evening at 8:30 p.m. and the first results only began to fall in about an hour later. While Stewart showed a brief lead when only a few hundred votes were counted, he trailed at times the rest of the night by as much as 12 percentage points and it appeared Church was headed for an easy victory.

Then the gap started to narrow.

Shortly after 12:30 Tuesday morning, Church took the stage not to concede or deliver an acceptance speech, but to try to rally the troops. At this point, his lead was down to about four points and just a few hundred votes.

Church and her team remained nervous as they waited for the early voting results. When the results were known, they contained a surprise that liberals feared and conservatives did not suspect.

“We are not winning this constituency, we have never won this constituency and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you,” a senior Conservative official from party headquarters said by telephone around midday on Monday.

It wasn’t just the party managing the expectations they put on me, it was reality. Toronto-St. Paul’s had been a Liberal stronghold for more than 30 years, and as of midday on June 24, the Conservative Party’s top brass expected it to stay that way.

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It wasn’t until shortly after 4:30 Tuesday morning that the numbers changed in Stewart’s favor. Just before 5:30 p.m., after all votes were counted, Stewart and the Conservatives were declared the winners.

According to Elections Canada, turnout was 43.5%, well above the 28% seen in the last two federal by-elections last year in Durham and Calgary.

To win, Stewart needed several things.

He needed disgruntled Liberals, unhappy with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership, to vote for him, and many clearly did. He also needed professionals and small business owners unhappy with the capital gains tax changes to come to him, which they did.

Finally, he needed the Jewish community concentrated in the Forest Hill neighborhood to abandon its long-standing ties to the Liberal Party and vote blue, which many clearly did.

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While Canadians cheered and were disappointed not to see the Edmonton Oilers pull off their own miracle on the ice Monday night, Stewart pulled off a miracle at the polls with all the elements coming together to help him win.

What is truly remarkable is that the Liberals controlled every aspect of the schedule for this by-election, giving them every advantage.

Long-serving MP Carolyn Bennett announced on July 24, 2023 that she would not run in the next election but would remain as an MP. In December last year, she announced she was stepping down as an MP and in January she was announced as Canada’s ambassador to Denmark.

The Liberals had been planning this byelection for almost a year — they found a candidate who was good on paper, who clearly worked for a close race, but ultimately lost because voters, even in St. Paul’s, chose to move. following Justin Trudeau.

The pressure on Trudeau to resign and allow a new face to take over will only grow now.

The only question remains whether he will answer the call.

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