WATCH: Laura Brown reports on the past month on the New Brunswick election campaign trail, where politicians have been making promises and mistakes, and talking about the key issues facing the province.
LATEST UPDATES as of 12:40 a.m. on Sept. 23:
- Vote counting suspended at 10:45 p.m. due to technical problems, Elections NB working “frantically” to fix problems.
- 73,000 new votes added to system around 12:30 a.m.
- Progressive Conservatives want manual recount; no one from party speaking tonight.
- Liberals leading or elected in 27 ridings, PCs leading or elected in 21 ridings.
- Green Party leader David Coon elected in Fredericton South riding.
- NDP leader Dominic Cardy defeated and resigns as party leader.
- About 300,000 ballots counted as of 12 a.m.
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick’s Liberals and governing Progressive Conservatives were locked in an unusually tight contest but the race was put on hold at about 10:45 p.m. AT after officials with Elections New Brunswick said they became concerned about discrepancies in the tabulation.
A spokesman for Elections New Brunswick said the agency encountered a technical problem with the tabulation machines it was using to count ballots.
Paul Harpelle said in an email that there were problems uploading data from memory cards and they were working “frantically” to resolve the delay in getting final results tallied.
Green Party leader David Coon made history in defeating Progressive Conservative candidate Craig Leonard.
ELECTION RESULTS: Live election results on Globalnews.ca
Coon, running in the riding of Fredericton South, will become the first Green candidate to win a seat in the provincial legislature.
PC leader David Alward and Liberal leader Brian Gallant each won their respective seats, while NDP leader Dominic Cardy lost his bid for election as the results of the New Brunswick election.
NDP leader Dominic Cardy resigned after losing in the riding of Fredericton West-Hanwell to PC candidate Brian Macdonald and resigned as party leader.
He said the party would hold a leadership race in the coming weeks.
Alward was elected in his riding of Carleton and Gallant was elected in his riding of Shediac Bay-Dieppe.
As of 12 a.m. about 300,000 ballots had been counted, with the Liberals leading or elected in 27 ridings and the Progressive Conservatives leading or elected in 21 ridings.
WATCH: It’s still neck and neck between the Liberals and Tories. The Liberals are maintaining their slim margin much to the chagrin of one PC supporter who joins Shelley Steeves.
Green Party leader David Coon opened up a lead in the riding of Fredericton South over PC candidate Craig Leonard in his bid to become the first candidate from his party to win a seat in the provincial legislature.
Progressive Conservative ministers who were re-elected are:
- Blaine Higgs, finance, in the bellwether riding of Quispamsis
- Ted Flemming, health
- Bruce Northrup, public safety
- Bruce Fitch, economic development
- Dorothy Shephard, healthy and inclusive communities, in the hotly contested Saint John Lancaster riding
- Trevor Holder, tourism, heritage and culture
Ministers who lost in their ridings are:
- Marie-Claude Blais, education and early childhood development
- Michael Olscamp, agriculture, aquaculture and fisheries
- Sue Stultz, government services
- Danny Soucy, environment and local government
- Robert Trevors, human resources
- Claude Williams, transportation and infrastructure
Liberal candidates elected included former interim party leader Victor Boudreau and Moncton-Centre candidate Chris Collins.
In the Memramcook-Tantramar riding, whose re-districting since the previous election is currently under a constitutional challenge, Liberal candidate Bernard LeBlanc was elected.
After a 32-day election campaign fought largely on jobs, voters were given the choice between a Liberal plan to turn the economy around through government stimulus or a Progressive Conservative promise to allow greater development of the province’s natural resources.
The Tories and Liberals are the dominant forces in New Brunswick politics and the choices offered by the two main parties on the economy are vastly different.
Gallant, the Liberal leader, is promising to spend $900 million over six years on infrastructure, a proposal he says would create more than 1,700 jobs a year in a province with one of the worst employment records in the country.
Alward, the Progressive Conservative leader, is pinning his re-election hopes on a plan to allow more softwood on Crown land to be harvested by forestry companies while also embracing energy companies that want to drill for shale gas, a divisive issue that led to a violent protest last year in Rexton where seismic testing was done.
Alward believes the province is on the verge of $10 billion in private investment flowing from the shale gas sector and the proposed Energy East Pipeline, which would see oil shipped from Alberta to Saint John.
On shale gas, Gallant is taking a more cautious approach, promising a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, until more study is done on the risks.
READ MORE: 2014 New Brunswick election ridings and candidates
The final full day of the campaign on Sunday saw Gallant and Alward pump up the party faithful at a series of rallies and barbecues.
Gallant, 32, predicted a tight outcome as he campaigned in Saint-Antoine in front of a memorial to legendary Liberal premier Louis Robichaud, the first Acadian to be elected premier of New Brunswick in 1960.
“Louis Robichaud would be one of my political idols,” said Gallant, a lawyer who grew up in the Acadian community of Grande-Digue, just northeast of Moncton.
Alward campaigned on the party’s main slogan on Sunday, which has featured ads where the Tories encourage voters to “Say Yes” to different pieces of their platform.
READ MORE: Learn more about New Brunswick’s political party leaders
“It’s about saying ‘Yes’ to our province, it’s about saying ‘Yes’ to our people and about saying ‘Yes’ to providing opportunities to our people to have great jobs here and set strong roots for their families,” Alward, who operates a small family farm near Woodstock, told a rally in Moncton.
Alward, 54, played down concerns about the environment on shale gas as he argued the industry could stop workers heading to other parts of the country where the job prospects are better.
“The reality is it is being done safely,” Alward said. “I have the obligation to build a strong province, to give opportunities for our people to be able to have great jobs here and set strong roots here instead of being separated by thousands of miles.”
At the final debate of the campaign on Thursday, Alward conceded he is disappointed the Conservatives didn’t fulfill all of the promises they made in 2010, including balancing the government’s books during their mandate.
Cardy, 44, and the NDP are pinning their hopes of a breakthrough on voters’ dissatisfaction with the grip the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives have had on the province, presenting the party as a fresh voice that is badly needed in the legislature.
Cardy became leader of the party in 2011 and his campaign has been bolstered by three high-profile NDP candidates who previously held seats in the house for the Tories and the Liberals. The NDP has never won more than one seat in New Brunswick and was shut out of the legislature in the last election.
The NDP has promised to wait two years before considering development of a shale gas sector, at which point companies wanting to exploit the resource would have to undergo tests to assure health and environmental concerns are satisfied. Cardy has also committed to setting up a royalty rate and putting shale gas development to a free vote in the house.
In the late stages of the campaign, Cardy became a frequent target for Gallant as some observers speculated the Liberals feared a rise in support for the NDP could hurt their chances on election day by splitting the vote in some ridings.
Coon, 57, spent the last day of the campaign pushing for action on climate change, saying practical solutions to reduce New Brunswick’s carbon footprint would lead to new jobs.
At dissolution, the Progressive Conservatives had 41 seats, the Liberals 13 and there was one Independent. Redistribution will see the number of seats in the house cut to 49 from 55 in this election.
— With files from Melanie Patten
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