Polls have closed nationwide and results from hundreds of federal ridings are starting to pour in from Elections Canada as the unprecedented 44th general election comes to an end.
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Polls have closed nationwide and results from hundreds of federal ridings are starting to pour in from Elections Canada as the unprecedented 44th general election comes to an end.
With about 800,000 ballots counted so far, the Liberals have 42 per cent of the ballots cast, the Conservatives have about 33 per cent and the NDP has nearly 17 per cent of the vote share. The Green Party has captured three per cent of the ballots cast so far, while the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) has more than 4.5 per cent of all votes.
It is still too early to call most of the races west of the Quebec-New Brunswick border. The ballot counting is well underway in Atlantic Canada, where the polls have been closed for more than two hours.
The early results from the region’s 32 seats suggest the Conservatives are poised to pick up some seats in this election, which means Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau may struggle to get the majority government he wanted when he called this election more than a month ago.
The Atlantic region has been a Liberal stronghold for the last two election cycles — the party swept every seat there in 2015 and dropped only five in 2019.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, who has appointed a number of Maritimers to senior roles in the party, is on pace to perform better than his recent predecessors in this region.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper was shut out of Atlantic Canada in 2015 while his successor, Andrew Scheer, picked up only four seats in the 2019 contest — three in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia.
- This story will be updated as results roll in, so please refresh. Get live results from across Canada and in your riding here.
O’Toole, who pitched a more moderate form of conservatism than previous Conservative leaders, has already outperformed both Harper and Scheer in the seat count in this part of Canada.
Liberal cabinet minister Bernadette Jordan loses her N.S. seat
According to the CBC News decision desk, Conservative candidates have been declared elected in six of the region’s ridings. Conservative Rick Perkins has unseated Liberal incumbent Bernadette Jordan in the Nova Scotia riding of South Shore-St Margarets. Jordan served as fisheries minister in Trudeau’s cabinet.
The Conservative candidate in Cumberland-Colchester, Stephen Ellis, has also defeated Liberal incumbent Lenore Zann.
The first projected winner of this election was Liberal incumbent Seamus O’Regan in St. John’s South—Mount Pearl, who serves as natural resources minister in Trudeau’s cabinet. Dominic LeBlanc, another Liberal cabinet minister, has also been projected as the winner in his Beauséjour riding in New Brunswick.
Another prominent Liberal, Sean Fraser, the parliamentary secretary to the finance minister, has held off his Conservative challenger in the riding of Central Nova, a seat that was once held by former Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay.