Liberals win in Toronto-Centre and Bourassa, Tories take 1 in Manitoba

OTTAWA – It’s shaping up to be a very good night for Justin Trudeau.

The Liberals are leading in three of four federal byelections – including a potential upset in the longtime Conservative bastion of Brandon-Souris in Manitoba.

They’ve managed to hold on to two Liberal strongholds – Toronto Centre and the Montreal riding of Bourassa – despite an all-out effort by the NDP to steal them away.

And they’ve got a 400-vote lead over the Conservatives in Brandon-Souris, a riding that has voted Conservative in all but one election over the last 60 years.

Trudeau, who was on hand for the victory party in Bourassa, took a pointed shot at NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, accusing him of erasing the positive legacy of his late predecessor.

The NDP “is no longer the hopeful, optimistic party of Jack Layton, it is the negative, divisive party of Thomas Mulcair,” Trudeau told cheering crowds in Montreal.

“It is the Liberal party that proved tonight that hope is stronger than fear, that positive politics can and should win out over negative.”

While the Tories easily hung on to the riding of Provencher another Conservative fortress in Manitoba, a loss in Brandon would be widely seen as a condemnation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s handling of the Senate expenses scandal.

And even in Provencher, the Conservative share of the vote dropped significantly, to about 57 per cent from 71 per cent in the 2011 election.

In the Montreal and Toronto contests, the Conservatives weren’t even factors, scoring less than 10 per cent of the vote in each.

For the NDP, the results are disappointing. The party poured all its resources behind star candidates in Bourassa and Toronto Centre: lawyer and one-time pop singer Stephane Moraille and well-known journalist and author Linda McQuaig, respectively.

However, the NDP share of the popular vote in Bourassa actually went down slightly from the 2011 election.

And while McQuaig’s share of the vote was up about five percentage points in Toronto Centre, the Liberal vote share, under Trudeau’s hand-picked star contender Chrystia Freeland, went up as well by roughly the same amount.

In the two Manitoba ridings, the NDP ran a distant third, with less than 10 per cent of the vote. In the 2011 election, the NDP ran a relatively respectable second.

The Liberals, who were almost non-existent in the two Manitoba ridings in 2011, dramatically increased their share of the vote in both.

The byelections are the first concrete measure of the Senate expenses scandal’s impact on Stephen Harper’s government, the depth of Trudeau’s popular appeal and the durability of the NDP’s 2011 electoral breakthrough.