OTTAWA – In the end, they held on. By 391 votes.
The ruling Conservatives staved off defeat from the Liberals on Monday in Manitoba’s nail-biting Brandon-Souris byelection, with Conservative Larry Maguire beating Liberal Rolf Dinsdale.
But even though the Liberals lost, you could argue Canada’s third party also kind of won.
Roaring back from a fourth place 5.4 per cent finish in 2011, the Liberals gave the Tories a scare in Conservative country, battling until the bitter end for a seat that had no business going Grit.
And it almost did.
READ MORE: Byelections measure impact of Senate scandal, battle for opposition supremacy
Maguire won by 44.1 per cent of the vote, down by 20 points from Conservative MP Merv Tweed, who resigned his seat in August. The Liberals took 42.7 per cent.
So what happened in a riding that has gone Conservative for all but four of the past 60 years?
It was the result of a combination of factors, a “perfect storm” as one professor put – from a contested Conservative nomination process, to questions about what the prime minister knew about the ongoing Senate scandal, to the three visits from Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and his uncanny ability to draw a crowd.
The Conservatives held on, however – a sign that the well-oiled machine is still lubricated. Probably not a coincidence that deputy chief of staff in the prime minister’s office Jenni Byrne flew in from Ottawa to help the fight.
In the end, both the Liberals and Tories held on to two ridings each.
Journalist Chrysia Freeland (49 per cent, with 207/268 polls reporting) bested another writer, Linda McQuaig (36 per cent), in Bob Rae’s former riding of Toronto-Centre. Both of their parties’ popular vote went up – Freeland by eight per cent, McQuaig by six – while the Conservative candidate’s share fell from 20.6 per cent to 9.
Quebec National Assembly MLA Emmanuel Dubourg kept Bourassa Liberal (48.1 per cent) against the NDP candidate, former Bran Van 3000 singer Stéphane Moraille (31.6 per cent).
The Tories held on to Provencher in Manitoba, with Ted Falk winning with 58 per cent of the vote. Still, support was down from the 70 per cent won by former cabinet minister Vic Toews in 2011.
The Liberals also saw their support in Provencher rise to 30 per cent from 7 per cent, while the NDP fell from 18 to 8 per cent.
But it was Brandon that proved the biggest fight.
“This should not have been a close race,” said Kelly Saunders, an assistant professor of Canadian politics at Brandon University.
“I think it’s a little bit of a referendum on where each party is going as it heads towards 2015.”
Meanwhile, NDP support fell from 25 per cent to 7.8 per cent in Brandon.
Nathan Rotman, the NDP’s National Director, already painted Bourassa and Toronto-Centre as “safe” Liberal seats.
“Our goal here is to build on our 2011 campaign results and continue to grow and build towards 2015,” he said Monday.
The NDP will continue to paint itself as an alternative to the Conservatives, he said.
“General elections and byelections are very, very different experiences,” he said. “Byelections are really these kind of microcosms, they don’t reflect the national political circumstances in the same way as a general election does.”
Nelson Wiseman, associate professor of Canadian government at the University of Toronto, said what’s interesting is that the NDP has fallen from its second place position in the Prairies.
“Although the Conservatives have had an overwhelming and commanding dominance, the NDP has been second. A distant second, but a second nonetheless,” he said.
“That’s what really going on, is the Liberals…are way up in the polls, and that’s being translated at the constituency level.”
Rick Borotsik, the former Progressive Conservative MP who represented Brandon-Souris for seven years before Tweed, believes the race took on “another dimension” due to a nomination controversy that saw two of the three Conservative candidates disqualified by the party.
Borotsik, who left for provincial politics when Harper became leader, believes the prime minister took the riding for granted and the Senate scandal played a part in the party’s fall.
“You go to the coffee shops, and that’s all you hear. You hear the Senate scandal, how involved was Harper? After that many years in government there’s political baggage and I think they’re carrying baggage here in Brandon-Souris right now,” he said.
“A byelection is really an interesting time because it does allow a constituency to send a message. This is a Conservative riding, it will be a Conservative riding in the future.
“But it was a message that went to the national party saying listen: clean up your act.”
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