Conservatives projected to win Alberta byelection, Quebec returns showing tight race
CBC News is projecting that Conservative candidate Dane Lloyd will be elected tonight in the riding of Sturgeon River-Parkland, west of Edmonton, Alta.
With about 71 per cent of votes tallied so far, the Tory’s have secured just under 80 per cent of votes counted in former interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose’s old riding.
In MP Denis Lebel’s former riding of in Lac-Saint-Jean, Que., the vote remains too close to call.
Lloyd, 26, is a military reservist who recently worked as a parliamentary assistant for Michael Cooper, the Conservative MP for St. Albert-Edmonton.
During the campaign, Lloyd said he would push for a law where convicted murderers are made ineligible for parole unless they reveal what they did with their victim’s bodies.
The byelections, which come just after the two-year anniversary of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, mark the first time newly-minted Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh will be tested at the polls.
The test was not expected to be a tough one for Conservative candidate Lloyd in Alberta, where Ambrose last won her riding with more than 70 per cent of the vote during the 2015 federal election.
Still, the NDP’s Shawna Gawreluck and the Liberals Brian Gold will be hoping for an improvement on their party’s 2015 performances, when the NDP took just 10 per cent of the vote and the Liberals didn’t do much better, with 15.6 per cent.
Battleground Quebec
In the riding of Lac-Saint-Jean, however, the results are more difficult to predict.
While Lebel won the riding in 2015, he did so with only 33.3 per cent of the vote, closely followed by the NDP, which took 28 per cent. The Liberals and the Bloc Québécois both took 18.4 per cent while the Green Party of Canada came away with just 1.5 per cent of the vote.
It’s a tight race, with no obvious front-runner.
The NDP’s Gisèle Dallaire is hoping to win a seat in the province that gave her party 16 of its 44 MPs in the last election.
Lebel first won the riding in a byelection in 2007, improving the party’s performance by 23 per cent over the 2006 election. Lebel had the advantage of being a local mayor in the area with name recognition. It is an edge the Liberals are likely hoping will help them as well.
Voters in two federal ridings voted tonight to choose MPs to replace former Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose and former Conservative MP Denis Lebel. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
Richard Hébert, the outgoing mayor of Dolbeau-Mistassini, was accompanied by Trudeau last week on the campaign trail in a move that suggests the Liberals aren’t giving up the fight early. Trudeau also campaigned with Gold in Alberta.
The other two candidates looking to claim a victory in battleground Quebec are the Greens’ Yves Laporte and the Bloc’s Marc Maltais, who is well known in the riding and has the backing of the union representing workers at the Rio Tinto Alcan plant there.
Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/byelectionis-alberta-quebec-ambrose-lebel-1.4368311?cmp=rss