The federal Liberals will try to hang on to another seat in a December byelection in the Greater Vancouver area amid challenges in the polls and lacklustre results in the recent provincial election.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
announced on Nov. 10 the byelection for the riding of Cloverdale-Langley City will take place Dec. 16.
The Liberals lost two strongholds in byelections this past summer in Toronto and Montreal, leading to calls from within the party for Trudeau to step down.
Liberals place third in voting intentions in the province with 22 percent in the
latest poll by Abacus Data. Conservatives lead with 39 percent, followed by the NDP with 27 percent.
The seat of Cloverdale-Langley City was left vacant after Liberal MP John Aldag
resigned in May to run for the B.C. NDP. Aldag was unsuccessful in the Langley-Abbotsford provincial riding, losing by more than 20 percent of votes to B.C.’s Conservative Party.
The B.C. Conservatives surged from just 1.9 percent of the popular vote and not a single elected candidate in 2020 to win 44 seats in last month’s provincial election, coming close to unseating the ruling NDP which won 47 seats.
The four provincial ridings that roughly cover the area of the federal Cloverdale-Langley City riding were all won by B.C. Conservatives, albeit by small margins. For example, Conservatives won Surrey-Cloverdale by 587 votes, or 2.7 percent.
The election was a two-horse race between the NDP and the B.C. Tories. The successor to the provincial Liberals, B.C. United, did not run any candidates in the face of the Tory surge.
Flipping Riding
The riding of Cloverdale-Langley City has flipped hands between Liberals and Conservatives in recent years.Aldag won the seat in 2015 with a large margin and 47 percent of the votes. Aldag lost the riding to Tory candidate Tamara Jensen in
2019 by a percentage point, then flipped it back in
2021 by the same margin.
Jensen, an agricultural business owner, will be running again in the byelection in hopes of returning to the House of Commons.
“I’m so excited to be on this journey with all of you,” Jensen
posted on Facebook after the date of the byelection was announced. “This community means the world to me, and together, we’re going to bring it home!”
Jensen will be facing Liberal candidate
Madison Fleischer, who operates a public relations firm.
“Absolutely looking forward to putting forth a competitive campaign and keeping Cloverdale-Langley City as a Liberal voice in Parliament,” said Fleischer in a Nov. 11
post on the social media platform X.
The federal Liberals currently hold 14 seats in B.C.—all of them in Vancouver or the surrounding areas. Four cabinet ministers hail from B.C., including Emergency Preparedness Minister Harjit Sajjan, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, Citizens’ Services Minister Terry Beech, and Sports Minister Carla Qualtrough.
Qualtrough, representing the Delta riding,
announced recently she would not be seeking re-election.
The Liberal B.C. caucus also has one MP who has not publicly backed Trudeau amid questions about his leadership.
When asked by reporters last month whether he believes his party can win with Trudeau at the helm, MP Patrick Weiler
said, “It’s up to the prime minister to be able to show that he is and I’m not going to make that case for him.”
