Conservatives take Toronto riding in major upset for Liberals

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were hit with a stunning upset in a Monday night by-election, losing a midtown Toronto riding that the party has held for three decades and raising even more questions about the minority government’s prospects in next year’s general election.

The dramatic result even surprised Conservatives, who for weeks have said they were not expecting to win the long-shot seat.

Conservative candidate Don Stewart won with 42.1 per cent of the vote, when the networks called the election in his favour. Liberal Leslie Church was close behind with 40.5 per cent of the vote and 100 per cent of the polls reporting by 4:30 a.m. NDP candidate Amrit Parhar won 10.9 per cent of the vote.

The result dramatically increases the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. For months now he has adamantly said he will stay on as leader and try for a fourth mandate in government. But if the Liberals can’t win Toronto-St. Paul’s, it’s unclear what seats could still be considered safe for them, say political watchers. Even during the party’s worst defeat in 2011, it still held onto that seat with an 8-per-cent margin.

“There is no language too hyperbolic to describe the significance of this failure,” said Scott Reid, a Liberal strategist and principal at Feschuk.Reid. “If you can lose in St. Paul’s, then the Liberal Party can lose anywhere, and that means it can lose everything.”

“It means that you’re driving into a snowplow that’s even larger than 2011, than 1984, and so the only political comparison that will now be moving through the minds of Liberals is 1993 for the Progressive Conservatives, and that is devastation at a near extinction level event.”

Mr. Reid said the result is particularly stinging for the Prime Minister “because it tells him in indisputable, undeniable and implacable terms, that his leadership harms his own party.”

Until last year, the riding was represented by Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, who held the seat since 1997 and in the last election won with a 24-point margin over the second-place Conservatives.

Conservative strategist Ginny Roth, with Crestview Strategy, described the win as massive and “hard to overstate.”

“To me, that means the Liberals are under 15 seats in a general election,” she said. The party currently holds 155 seats and, in 2011, it held onto 34.