TORONTO / OTTAWA — While Canadians didn’t have to wait too long on election night to find out who will lead the next government, there are still several individual seats too close to call and it could take a few days to get clear results with many mail-in ballots still to be counted.
As of Wednesday morning, 17 seats had yet to be called, according to CTVNews.ca’s election tracker, with the Liberals leading in eight of the races, the Conservatives leading in two, the Bloc Quebecois leading four and the NDP in three.
The number still to be decided won’t affect the overall election result, which saw the Liberals returned with a minority government, the Conservatives the Official Opposition, and both the Bloc and NDP holding enough seats to hold the balance of power when it comes to the Liberals passing key legislation. But the outcomes of the individual races will have an impact on the people who live in those ridings, and could also end up affecting the outcome of free votes, where members don’t always vote along party lines, as well as the overall demographic breakdown of the House of Commons.
Seat counts can sometimes be seen as a referendum on party leaders, and any last-minute changes to the projected counts will be assessed by the parties as they take stock of their overall electoral showing.
Of course, there are some seats that may hold more symbolic or strategic value for certain parties. For example, there’s little doubt the Liberals would love to win back the British Columbia seat of Vancouver Granville, which they lost after Jody Wilson-Raybould was expelled from the Liberal caucus over the SNC-Lavalin scandal. She went on to win the seat as an independent in the 2019 federal election, but chose not to run for re-election this year.
As of Wednesday, Liberal Taleeb Noormohamed was leading the riding by just 230 votes—or just half a percentage point—over NDP candidate Anjali Appadurai, with the results of the local mail-in ballots still yet to be reported. In Vancouver Granville, 5359 local mail-in ballot voting kits had been returned to Elections Canada by election day.
Source: ctvnews.ca
