Recount underway in rural Newfoundland riding where Liberal had 12-vote lead

A judicial recount got underway Monday in a rural Newfoundland riding where the Liberals finished with a 12-vote lead.

Officials will recount every vote cast in the riding, and it could take a day or two before the results are known, Elections Canada said in an email Monday. The review will decide whether Liberal Anthony Germain or Conservative Jonathan Rowe represents the Terra Nova—The Peninsulas riding in Parliament.

The recount in central Newfoundland is one of four ordered after the election last month by the federal elections agency. In all four, the margins between the winner and the runner-up were fewer than 80 votes.

Amanda Bittner, a political science professor at Memorial University in St. John's, said the April 28 election was a great example of how sometimes, just a handful of votes can determine who wins.

"A lot of the time, voters will not come out to vote, because the costs are high and the payoff is low, and it won't make a difference anyway, so why bother?" Bittner said in an interview Monday.

"And then we have elections like this last one where, clearly, when the stakes are high and when competitiveness is high and it seems like a really important election, people do turn out to vote."

This year's election is the first in the past decade to end in races close enough to trigger an automatic judicial recount. Such counts are triggered when the winning margin is less than one-one thousandth of the valid votes cast in the riding, as per Elections Canada rules.

An automatic recount will begin Tuesday in Milton East—Halton Hills South, in Ontario, after Liberal Kristina Tesser Derksen finished 29 votes ahead of Conservative Parm Gill. On Saturday, an automatic recount ended in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne with the Liberals winning by just one vote.

In Windsor-Tecumseh, Conservative Kathy Borrelli finished ahead of Liberal Irek Kusmierczyk by 77 votes, which is just above the threshold for an automatic recount, but an Ontario Superior Court judge ordered a review last week.

By comparison, all of the recounts ordered in the 2021, 2019 and 2015 elections were requested by candidates, and none had margins narrow enough to trigger an automatic review, according to Elections Canada news releases. The majority had winning margins of more than 100 votes.

Bittner said a number of factors contributed to the unique year, including a sense that the election this year was particularly important. People were afraid of United States President Donald Trump making good on his threats to use economic force to make Canada the 51st state, and to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods, she said. 

And many voters felt like the election would be a close race between the Conservatives and the Liberals, Bittner said — especially since polls showed public favour shifting from the Conservatives to the Liberals in the months before the vote. Support for the NDP all but dried up: the party won 25 seats in the 2021 election, and just seven this year.

"There was a lot of uncertainty that led to a lot of close races that wouldn't have been so close in the past, because there would have been more viable third and fourth parties," she said.

Terra Nova — The Peninsulas covers a vast area of central Newfoundland. The recount began Monday in a community events hall in Marystown, N.L., which is about 185 kilometres southwest of St. John's.

Brian Keating, the town's mayor, said the recount was quite an event for the community of about 5,200 people.

"Everybody's been excited about it," he said in an interview. Pointing to Saturday's one-vote recount win for the Liberals, which brought the party one seat closer to a majority government, Keating added: "It's getting more interesting every day, isn't it?

The Liberal party now holds 170 seats in the House of Commons, two shy of the 172 needed for a majority government.

Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns