Polls have closed in the eastern Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona as voters there got the chance to choose a new member of Parliament on Monday in a byelection triggered by the resignation of the NDP’s Daniel Blaikie.
New Democratic Party candidate Leila Dance is trying to hold on to this seat for her party, which has won Elmwood-Transcona in every vote since its inception except for 2011, when the Conservatives won a majority government under Stephen Harper.
The Conservatives are running candidate Colin Reynolds in this byelection. His 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, who have not finished higher than third place in Elmwood-Transcona since 1997, are running Ian MacIntyre.
Green candidate Nicolas Geddert, Sarah Couture of the People’s Party and Zbig Strycharz of the Canadian Future Party are also on the ballot.
The seat was left vacant after 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.
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.
- Do you have questions about this byelection or what it could mean for the next federal election? Send an email to ask@cbc.ca.
Voting opened Monday at 8:30 a.m. and closed at 8:30 p.m. CT.
Elections Canada spokesperson Diane Benson said while some unofficial results will start getting posted after then, it will likely be another hour before “you’re going to really start to see things roll in,” Benson explained.
“Keep in mind that it takes a little bit of time,” she told CBC’s Up to Speed host Faith Fundal on Monday afternoon.
“They need to close the poll, open up that box, empty all the ballots out, and one by one they hold them up so that witnesses or scrutineers — the party representative for the candidate — can see how the vote was marked and they count them one by one.”
Elmwood-Transcona is one of two Canadian ridings where byelections are taking place.
A byelection is also being held in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, a Montreal riding most recently held by former Liberal cabinet minister David Lametti.
There are several ways to watch the results of both byelections.
An online special is streaming live starting at 8 p.m. CT. on Monday.
Power & Politics host David Cochrane is guiding viewers through live results, as a panel of insiders breaks down what they mean for the looming federal election.
Mélanie Richer, a former communications director for the NDP, told Cochrane the Winnipeg byelection is expected to be close — and an early test of whether the federal party and its leader Jagmeet Singh’s message that “it’s me versus the Conservatives in the next election” is resonating.
Meanwhile, Fred DeLorey, a former national Conservative campaign manager, said the fact that the race is so close in a riding like Elmwood-Transcona — which considering its history he said “should be an NDP stronghold” — shows how that party’s message has been resonating.
“This is obviously a competitive seat now, and it shouldn’t be,” he said. “The fact the Conservative party is doing well in suburban, urban Winnipeg I think says a lot for the party and for Mr. [Pierre] Poilievre’s message, in that it is resonating and working here.”
Greg MacEachern, a former Liberal ministerial staffer, said he was interested by the Conservatives’ choice of a candidate more on the labour side — setting up a race between Reynolds, a construction electrician, and Dance, a local non-profit and business leader.
“One of the things I’m going to watch tonight … is whether or not that was a play that they can actually carry through and [that] actually benefits for them,” MacEachern said.
The special is streaming live on CBCNews.ca, the CBC News App, CBC Gem, CBC News Explore and the CBC News YouTube page.
CBCNews.ca will have the latest updates, up-to-the-minute results and full political reaction to the results.