Tuesday December 17, 2024 | VICTORIA, BC
Political analysis by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
A federal by-election in Cloverdale-Langley City yesterday saw a win for Conservative candidate Tamara Jansen. She won with 9,931 votes in the December 16 by-election — a margin of 66.5% over the Liberal candidate Madison Fleischer (a local business person) who got 2,401 votes.
Polls were open to 8:30 pm. There were 122 voting stations in the riding.
NDP candidate Vanessa Sharma got 1,875 votes while the Green candidate Patrick McCutcheon got 580, the PPC candidate Ian Kennedy 133 and Libertarian candidate Alex Joehl got 59 votes.
Voter turnout was 16.27% (14,979 voters). Population of the Fraser Valley area riding is 130,665 with 92,061 registered voters.
Back and forth for Liberal and Conservative:
National media noted that this is the third loss for the Liberals across the country in three recent by-elections. The Conservatives may feel this validates poll results of the past year that show the Conservatives well ahead of the Liberals.
But the Cloverdale-Langley City riding has a strong Conservative base to begin with.
In fact, Jansen had held the seat in 2019-2021. The riding flipped to Liberal with John Aldag in 2021-2024 (he also held the riding for the Liberals in 2015-2019).
Upcoming federal general election:
The next federal election is coming up in 2025.
The scheduled date is October 20, 2025 but given the disarray of the Liberals right now (switching the Finance Minister from Chrystia Freeland to Dominic LeBlanc, and dealing with a band of backbenchers who are trying to encourage Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign) and the nearly complete dysfunction of the House of Commons for the entire fall session (no legislation was passed), the election may come sooner in the new year.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has also chimed in asking Trudeau to resign. Of course that is also the position of the Conservatives and now the Bloc is on that page.
===== RELATED:
NEWS SECTIONS: POLITICS | 2025 CANADIAN FEDERAL ELECTION