ANALYSIS: With four vacant ridings, why did Carney call just three byelections?

Voters in three federal ridings are being courted this summer by candidates hoping to fill vacant seats in the House of Commons.

There are actually four ridings without an MP right now, but only three byelections. Why didn’t Prime Minister Mark Carney call four?

The answer is a bit complicated, but the bottom line is that Liberal strategists would clearly have advised the prime minister that, given the unique political circumstances of the ridings that are currently vacant, the Liberals could give themselves a boatload more money to spend fighting off the Bloc Québecois in one vacant Québec seat by calling three byelections while depriving the BQ of cash it could use by holding off on that fourth by-election to fill a second vacant Québec seat.

The three byelections currently underway are in the B.C. riding of North Vancouver-Capilano, the Ontario riding of Beaches-East York, and the Québec riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord. The other Québec riding that’s vacant is Saint Hyacinthe-Bagot-Acton.

In North Van and Beaches, the Liberals are the incumbent party and are easy favourites to hold those seats, according to the Global News election model which is based on an aggregate of multiple public polls. That means the Liberals will not need to spend much to defend seats they won in 2025 by 26 and 44 percentage points, respectively.

The Bloc Québecois is the incumbent party in Saint Hyacinthe-Bagot-Acton and they should have no trouble holding that riding whenever that byelection will be held. In 2025, the BQ beat the second-place Liberals there by 10 points.

Chicoutimi-Le Fjord is different: in the 2025 general election, Conservative Richard Martel (now sitting as an independent senator) eked out a narrow win with 33.7 per cent of the popular vote versus 30.8 per cent for the BQ and 30.7 per cent for the Liberals. The Global News election model, aggregating Quebec-only results from eight national pollsters, has Chicoutimi right now as a three-way toss-up. Every vote there in the Aug. 31 byelection will count. And every dollar spent there by any party will make a difference.

Get daily National news

Get daily Canada news delivered to your inbox so you'll never miss the day's top stories.

Sign up for daily National newsletter Get Started

By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

So, how much can parties spend? Federal election finance laws set two kinds of spending limits: one for local candidates and one for parties running candidates in each riding. The amount will vary in each riding depending on the number of electors in each riding. Last week, Elections Canada published the spending limits for each candidate. In North Van, each candidate is capped at $140,839.70; in Beaches-East York, it’s $134,454.45; and in Chicoutimi it’s $131,296.71. Candidates can only spend that allocated expense limit in the riding.

But the parties get additional spending headroom based on the number of candidates they are running in each riding up for grabs. The Bloc Québecois is running just one candidate, of course, in the three vacant ridings. The Liberals — and Conservatives and New Democrats — are running candidates in all three. And per Elections Canada’s rules: “A party with candidates in more than one electoral district may distribute its election expenses limit among the electoral districts as it sees fit.”

In other words, the Liberals can take the spending headroom they get for candidates running in safe seats in North Van and Beaches and pour all of that spending into the tight race in Chicoutimi. If Carney had called byelections in all four vacant ridings, and not just three, the Bloc could then have transferred spending limits from its safe seat in Saint-Hyacinthe to the tight race in Chicoutimi.

But Carney held off on the byelection in Saint-Hyacinthe, effectively denying the Bloc the financial resources it would almost certainly have used in Chicoutimi. For what it’s worth, Carney is not legally obligated to name a byelection date for Saint-Hyacinthe until the middle of December.

In any event, here’s what Elections Canada has allocated as expense limits for parties with registered candidates in all three ridings where there is a byelection underway: Chicoutimi – $99,139.01; Beaches – $107,639.28; North Van – $117,208.54.

So adding the party’s expense limit plus the candidate expense limit, the maximum amount the Bloc can spend to steal Chicoutimi from the Conservatives is about $229,000.

But the Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP — because they are running candidates in Ontario and BC — could spend up to $453,000 to win Chicoutimi: nearly twice as much as the Bloc.

Now, what about the Conservatives? Will that party transfer all the cash it’s allowed to spend in Ontario and BC to defend its 2025 win in Chicoutimi? Parties will never tell you how they spend their election cash but the answer would be a qualified “maybe.”

Embattled Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre cannot afford to lose Chicoutimi and so one would assume the party will throw everything it can into the Québec contest. But holding what it has may not be good enough for Poilievre and the Conservatives. After losing five MPs to defections or the Senate in a year, Poilievre needs to show he can take the Liberals down a notch and the best chance of that happening is in North Vancouver where Carney’s former deputy chief of staff, Braeden Caley, is carrying the Liberal banner.

Now it’s unlikely the Conservative candidate in North Van – Stephen Curran — will beat Caley, but if Curran, who ran and lost to Jonathan Wilkinson in the same riding in the 2025 general election, can make it close, Conservatives could spin that as making progress against the Carney Liberals. But, a moral victory in North Van would not nearly offset the failure to achieve actual victory in holding on to Chicoutimi. Tough choice for the Tories.

Meanwhile, there are other subtle ways in which a governing party can remind a local electorate of the value of voting for one its members: on Wednesday, a Liberal MP who represents a downtown Montréal riding will travel hundreds of kilometres to the Saguenay region where Chicoutimi-Le Fjord is found to announce federal government funding for a critical minerals project in the region. Handing out Ottawa’s cash, of course, is something no Bloc Québecois MP will ever get to do. Only those MPs on the government benches get to do that — a point that the Liberal MP travelling to the Saguenay, Claude Guay, is most likely to mention to Chicoutimi’s voters.

David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.