Maguire made gains while Liberal support collapses

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This article was published 01/11/2019 (2191 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A poll-by-poll breakdown of federal election results in Brandon-Souris shows Conservative incumbent Larry Maguire made great gains over his 2015 election performance.

Maguire won all but four of the riding’s 149 polls, losing three in Brandon and one at the polling area Elections Canada refers to as Oak Lake Reserve.

That’s a big jump over the 2015 general federal election, when Liberal candidate Jodi Wyman won 61 of the 84 polls located within Brandon.

Brandon University associate professor and chair of political science Kelly Saunders said the results in Brandon-Souris mirror a trend across Western Canada against the Liberal party and to embrace the Conservative party.

“I think it really speaks to the larger issues that we are seeing that push against the Liberals — rejection of the Liberal party out here in Western Canada and that is, I think in large measure, why we see what we saw happening here on election night,” she said.

As a result, NDP candidate Ashley Duguay came in second with 5,805 votes. Terry Hayward of the Liberals, traditionally the second-place party in Brandon-Souris, came in a close third place with 4,972 votes. Maguire received a total of 26,148 votes.

The Liberal vote collapsed locally, dropping from 37.3 per cent in 2015 to 12.1 per cent in 2019. The NDP vote rose from 6.3 per cent to 14.1 per cent.

Saunders said she was surprised to see the NDP do so well in the riding. Western frustration with the Liberal party was a factor in the party’s success, but so is increased political polarization in Canada.

“People are tending to split a little bit along the left or along the right, and certainly the NDP would be able to take advantage of that,” she said.

Smaller parties and independents received far fewer votes in Brandon-Souris. Green party candidate Bill Tiessen came in fourth with 2,984 votes, People’s Party candidate Rob Lussier received 691 votes, Christian Heritage Party candidate Rebecca Hein received 280 and independents Vanessa Hamilton and Robert Eastcott received 219 and 107 votes, respectively.

Maguire won almost every individual poll in Brandon by dozens or hundreds of votes. Even in the polls Duguay did win in the city, she just edged Maguire out by 10 or fewer votes. Her highest winning margin was in Oak Lake Reserve, where she won by 29 votes.

Maguire won 9,106 of 17,665 votes cast in the city. He did particularly well in Virden, where at 1,090 votes he took in almost 10 times more votes than Duguay’s 113.

In Brandon, the results in the 2019 election are the opposite of 2015, when Saunders said Brandon appeared to be becoming more politically progressive along with other urban centres.

“I’m not sure if this is just a momentary pushback against the Liberals or if in fact we are going to see Brandon continue to become more Conservative over the years,” she said.

“I think it’s just in this moment in time that we’re seeing so much anger against the Liberals. … I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to hold down the road.”

Hayward did better than Duguay on some individual polls in Brandon and larger towns, but only eclipsed Maguire’s total in Oak Lake Reserve — one of the polls Duguay won.

While it led to great success in Brandon-Souris for Maguire, Saunders said the increasing margins in already secure Conservative ridings doesn’t help the party on the national stage. The party increased its share of the national popular vote in 2019 but earned fewer seats than the minority Liberal government.

“There’s no point in winning ever-larger majorities in a riding you already hold, those are just wasted votes,” she said, adding that until the Conservatives can break through in Quebec and hold on to whatever foothold they’ve got in Ontario, they will continue to be shut out of government.

Voter turnout dropped slightly in Brandon-Souris in the most recent election, from just over 68 per cent in 2015 to 66 per cent in 2019. While the number of people who voted did go down, Saunders said she is glad to see it consistently above the under-60 per cent turnout in the early 2000s.

» dmay@brandonsun.com

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