New Democratic Party candidate Leila Dance will win the byelection to represent the eastern Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona, holding on to the party’s seat in the area, CBC News projects.
With 187 of 191 polls reporting — over 97 per cent — Dance holds the lead with 13,039 votes over Conservative Colin Reynolds, who has 11,591.
“I will fight for Elmwood-Transcona,” Dance told supporters at her victory celebration Monday night. “I promise to make you all so proud of me, and I will see you in Ottawa.”
Reynolds conceded defeat in a speech to supporters as votes continued to be counted in the byelection triggered by the resignation of the riding’s longtime NDP representative.
“While this certainly was not the result we were hoping for, I’m proud of the work we did here,” Reynolds told people gathered to watch the results come in at Royal George Hotel.
“We were the underdog in this, and we made it a tight race.”
As of the latest results, Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre has 1,288 votes in the riding, while Green candidate Nicolas Geddert has 350, People’s Party candidate Sarah Couture has 336, and the Canadian Future Party’s Zbig Strycharz has 123.
NDP candidate Dance was hoping to hold on to the Elmwood-Transcona seat for her party, which has won it in every vote since its inception except for 2011, when the Conservatives won a majority government under Stephen Harper.
Conservative candidate Reynolds’s campaign aimed to unseat the NDP by drawing attention to the two-year confidence-and-supply deal between the New Democrats and the governing Liberal Party, which the NDP said it was ending earlier this month.
The Liberals have not finished higher than third place in Elmwood-Transcona since 1997.
The seat was left vacant after Daniel Blaikie resigned in March to take a job with Wab Kinew’s provincial NDP government in Manitoba. Blaikie won three elections for the NDP and served more than eight years as MP.
- Do you have questions about this byelection or what it could mean for the next federal election? Send an email to ask@cbc.ca.
According to Elections Canada, 10,032 Elmwood-Transcona voters, or 14 per cent of the registered voters in the riding, cast a ballot in advance polls.
Voting opened Monday at 8:30 a.m. and closed at 8:30 p.m. CT.
Elmwood-Transcona is one of two Canadian ridings where a byelection was taking place.
A byelection was also held in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, a Montreal riding most recently held by former Liberal cabinet minister David Lametti.