Results are in for last night’s by-election to the Canadian parliament: voters in the constituency of Toronto-St Paul’s elected the Conservative candidate Don Stewart over his Liberal opponent Leslie Church, taking one seat away from the government party and giving it to Pierre Poilievre’s official opposition. The count took longer than usual due to abnormally large ballots, the result of dozens of protest candidacies, meaning the suspense lasted until the winner was announced around 5am the next day, when Canadians woke up to what could be an altered political landscape.
By-elections are usually sleepy affairs. This contest, however, attracted a great deal of attention for reasons having to do with national trends. It was touted by commentators as nothing less than a “referendum” on struggling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose approval numbers (along with those of his party) have been in the doldrums for well over a year.
Toronto-St Paul’s happened to be one of the safest Liberal seats, which the party held for 30 years. Its last MP, Dr Carolyn Bennet, was a minister in Trudeau‘s cabinet who stepped down to become Ambassador to Denmark; her long string of victories in past elections — having won by a margin of 24% in the 2021 campaign — seemed to attest to how comfortable the residents of this affluent portion of Toronto’s Midtown had been with the Liberal brand. But during this election, Stewart won by 15,555 votes (42.1 %) to Church’s 14,965 (40.5 %). The fact that they have now rejected the Liberals speaks volumes about the scale of the party’s decline.