Don Stewart did the unthinkable, he won the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s for the Conservatives. This is the first time the Conservatives have won the riding since 1988 and they did it in spectacular fashion.
Stewart took 15,555 votes, or 42.1% of all ballots cast to the 14,965 or 40.5% of the vote taken by Liberal candidate Leslie Church.
Vote counts were delayed due to the unique ballot that saw 84 candidates listed. That made counting each vote, a process still done by hand with no electronic counting machines, incredibly slow. The polls closed at 8:30 Monday evening and the first results didn’t start trickling in until about an hour later.
While Stewart showed a brief lead when there were just a few hundred votes counted, he trailed the rest of the night at times by as much as 12 percentage points and it appeared Church was headed for an easy victory. Then the gap started to close. Shortly after 12:30 Tuesday morning, Church stood on stage not to concede or give an acceptance speech but to try to rally the troops.
At that point her lead had shrunk to roughly four points and just a few hundred votes. Church and her team remained nervous waiting for advance polls to come in. When the results did, they contained a surprise the Liberals had been dreading and the Conservatives were not suspecting.
“We’re not winning this riding, we were never winning this riding and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you,” a senior Conservative from party HQ had said over the .
