Federal Election
It’s not 2015, but Liberals still win almost all seats in Nova Scotia
Preliminary results show Liberals holding on to all but one of their seats despite big drop in support
The Liberals no longer have an electoral monopoly in Nova Scotia.
While the party still won almost every seat in the province, the Conservatives chipped away at their dominance last night, picking up the riding of West Nova.
Chris D’Entremont, who resigned as the Tory MLA for Argyle-Barrington to run in this election, defeated Liberal newcomer Jason Deveau.
In Sydney-Victoria, a crowded race saw the lead swing back and forth for much of the evening between Conservative Eddie Orrell and Liberal Jaime Battiste, but the final polls to report swung the race in Battiste’s favour. He is Nova Scotia’s first Indigenous MP.
The riding had been left with no incumbent when longtime Liberal Mark Eyking decided not to run again.
The race in Sydney-Victoria saw several candidates draw significant vote totals. The NDP’s Jodi McDavid had about 20 per cent of the vote, while Independent candidate Archie MacKinnon pulled about 14 per cent, and with the vote splitting several ways the seat was on its way to being won with barely more than 30 per cent of the vote.
Click on the ridings to see who won:
While the Liberals did well last night, they did bleed a lot of votes. In 2015 they won 62 per cent of votes in Nova Scotia in taking every single seat. Early this morning, they were down to 41 per cent in unofficial results.
Cumberland-Colchester was another tight race with the lead swinging back and forth between Conservative Scott Armstrong and Liberal Lenore Zann, who picked up the candidacy after incumbent Bill Casey stepped down. Zann left her position as the provincial NDP MLA for Truro-Bible Hill to run federally as a Liberal, and Armstrong fought to reclaim the Conservative seat he occupied before the Liberal take-over in 2015. With 96 per cent of the vote counted, Zann had a 375 vote lead.
Geoff Regan once again held Halifax West for the Liberals, as did incumbent Darrell Samson in Sackville-Preston-Chezzetcook. The rest of the urban Halifax seats stayed in the Liberal fold.
South Shore-St. Margaret’s had most often voted Conservative prior to 2015, when it went Liberal. Bernadette Jordan, the minister of rural economic development, won a second term last night.
Nova Scotians elected 11 Liberal MPs in 2015, a clean sweep. This year five of them didn’t run again, creating conditions for possibly competitve races. Longtime Liberals Rodger Cuzner and Eyking both stepped down in Cape Breton earlier this year, as did Bill Casey in Cumberland- Colchester and Colin Fraser in West Nova. Scott Brison’s Liberal seat in Kings-Hants was vacated earlier this year.
But in the end, despite abandoning a promise to reform the electoral system, the SNC Lavalin affair and the recent blackface Scandal, red was still the colour of the night.
