Local Conservatives Ian Symington (Sudbury) and Charles Humphrey (Nickel Belt) made serious gains in Monday’s federal election, but the spectre of vote splitting raises questions.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole cautioned Sunday against splitting the vote by supporting People’s Party of Canada candidates, according to The Canadian Press.
“Justin Trudeau wants you to split the vote by voting PPC,” he told a crowd in Toronto, as reported by The Canadian Press.
“There’s only one way to get change. There’s only one way to show Justin Trudeau the door tomorrow, and that’s to vote Conservative.”
The same questions were raised in the Nipissing - Timiskaming riding.
See: Did split Conservative vote lead to Liberal victory in Nipissing-Timiskaming?
There, Conservative candidate Steve Trahan felt the PPC candidate cost him the election saying “He definitely hurt me,” referring to the People’s Party getting 3,269 votes. "If you take the PPC’s votes, even if you took 50 per cent of them, we’d be splitting hairs right now."
Between Sudbury and Nickel Belt, the PPC had the strongest showing in Nickel Belt, where David Hobbs landed 4,542 votes, according to the latest preliminary results.
If all of these votes had gone to the Conservatives, it would have boosted Humphrey from third place behind the Liberals and NDP to first, clearing incumbent Liberal Marc Serré by 634 votes.
In Sudbury, Symington would have been bumped from third to second place, a mere 169 votes shy of Liberal Viviane Lapointe — again, if all of PPC candidate Colette Methé’s 2,684 votes went Conservative blue.
Although Humphrey said he can see where those who are making this argument are coming from — PPC Leader Maxime Bernier was, after all, a failed Conservative leadership candidate — he doesn’t quite buy it.
“For my own ego, it’s nice to say, ‘Oh yeah, if only it weren’t for them we would have won,’ but I don’t think that’s a fair appraisal of what went on there,” he said Tuesday afternoon, still recovering from the high-energy climate of the previous night’s election.
“Although I’m sure there are people in the PPC voter block that would have in other circumstances voted for us, I also think there are a number of people who probably would have voted for other parties or not voted at all,” he said, adding that PPC supporters are very much in a league of their own, and that he’s reticent to even call them “right-leaning.”
“I think that they represent a movement of just fear and mistrust of government more than anything, and I think that is something that unfortunately reflects the sort of larger landscape that we’re in where we’re all in a situation where I think we all feel a loss of control over our lives.”
They’re a product of pandemic anxieties and the “hermetically-sealed infospheres” of social media than they are a right-leaning political alternative to the Conservatives, he said, questioning what difference they may have actually made in the final election results.
“We could all point fingers and blame this party or that party … but the reality is there are the parties there are, people join them, and that’s how this operates,” he said, adding there’s a lot to be said for not having a binary system such as what we see south of the border.
Although less satisfying for some candidates, he said our system ensures “a broader sense of choice and more options for people. … There’s more opportunity for consensus-building and moving forward despite divisions.”
Rather than play the blame game, Humphrey said he’s enthused by this election’s Conservative gains in Nickel Belt and that he looks forward to keeping this forward momentum going into the next election, whenever that might be.
In the 2019 election, 20.56 per cent of voters gave Sudbury Conservative candidate Pierre St-Amant an “X” on their ballots, while 21.17 per cent awarded Nickel Belt Conservative candidate Aino Laamanen their vote.
This time around, Symington received 27.81 per cent of the vote and Humphey received 26.98 per cent, according to the latest preliminary results.
Hobbs did not return a request for comment for this story.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
