LILLEY: Conservatives' shock win in Toronto-St. Paul's adds pressure to Trudeau to step down

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Don Stewart did the unthinkable, he won the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s for the Conservatives. This is the first time the Conservatives have won the riding since 1988 and they did it in spectacular fashion.

Stewart took 15,555 votes, or 42.1% of all ballots cast to the 14,965 or 40.5% of the vote taken by Liberal candidate Leslie Church.

Vote counts were delayed due to the unique ballot that saw 84 candidates listed. That made counting each vote, a process still done by hand with no electronic counting machines, incredibly slow.

The polls closed at 8:30 Monday evening and the first results didn’t start trickling in until about an hour later. While Stewart showed a brief lead when there were just a few hundred votes counted, he trailed the rest of the night at times by as much as 12 percentage points and it appeared Church was headed for an easy victory.

Then the gap started to close.

Shortly after 12:30 Tuesday morning, Church stood on stage not to concede or give an acceptance speech but to try to rally the troops. At that point her lead had shrunk to roughly four points and just a few hundred votes.

Church and her team remained nervous waiting for advance polls to come in. When the results did, they contained a surprise the Liberals had been dreading and the Conservatives were not suspecting.

“We’re not winning this riding, we were never winning this riding and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you,” a senior Conservative from party HQ had said over the phone around noon on Monday.

This wasn’t just the party managing expectations they were assuring me, this was reality. Toronto-St. Paul’s had been a Liberal stronghold for more than 30 years and as of noon on June 24, the Conservative Party’s top brass expected it to stay that way.

It wasn’t until just after 4:30 Tuesday morning that the numbers shifted in Stewart’s favour. Just prior to 5:30, with all votes counted, Stewart and the Conservatives were declared the winner.

Voter turnout, according to Elections Canada, stood at 43.5%, well above the 28% witnessed in the last two federal byelections over the last year in Durham and Calgary.

To win, Stewart needed several things to happen.

He needed disaffected Liberals, upset with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership, to come out and vote for him, which many clearly did. He also needed professionals and small business owners upset over the capital gains tax changes to show up for him, which they did.

Finally, he needed the Jewish community concentrated to the Forest Hill neighbourhood to abandon their long-held ties to the Liberal Party and vote blue, which clearly many did.

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While Canadians cheered for and were disappointed at not seeing the Edmonton Oilers pull off their own miracle on ice Monday night, Stewart pulled off a miracle at the ballot box with all elements coming together to allow him to win.

What is truly remarkable about this is that the Liberals controlled every aspect of the timing of this byelection, giving them every advantage.

Longtime MP Carolyn Bennett announced on July 24, 2023 that she was would not run in the next election but would stay on as an MP. In December of last year, she announced she was stepping down as a Member of Parliament and in January she was announced as Canada’s ambassador to Denmark.

Liberals were planning this byelection for close to a year — they found a candidate who was good on paper, who clearly put in the work for a tight race, but in the end lost because voters, even in St. Paul’s, have chosen to move on from Justin Trudeau.

The pressure on Trudeau to step down, to allow a new face to take over will only grow now.

Whether he heeds the call remains the only question.

blilley@postmedia.com