Progressive Conservatives Win Majority in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ending Decade of Liberal Rule

By the time the last ballots were tallied on Tuesday night, Newfoundland and Labrador had ended a decade of Liberal government. Tony Wakeham's Progressive Conservatives crept into a narrow lead during a back-and-forth count, then steadily pulled away from Premier John Hogan's Liberals to win a slim majority.

Three hours after the polls closed, the Tories had taken 21 of the legislature's 40 ridings, a gain of seven. The Liberals held 15, down six. Jim Dinn's New Democrats doubled their seat count to two, and two well-known Independents were re-elected. The popular vote was tighter than the seat count suggests: the Tories took 44.37 per cent to the Liberals' 43.43 per cent.

One result was close enough to test the province's recount rules, which trigger an automatic recount when the margin is 10 votes or less. The narrowest race, in Lewisporte–Twillingate, was not quite that close. Tory candidate Mark Butt beat Liberal Derek Bennett by 18 votes.

In his victory speech, Wakeham went after the pundits who had expected another Liberal win. He said he had spent more than 30 years coaching basketball, and that no statistic matters less than the halftime score. A couple of months earlier, he said, many people had looked at that score and decided the election was over. His line for the night was that there is nothing quite like a comeback.

Wakeham, a former health-care bureaucrat, said he won voters over by talking consistently about health care, crime and pocketbook issues. Throughout the campaign he asked voters whether they were better off under the Liberals, who were seeking a fourth straight term.

The central fight was over a proposed multibillion-dollar energy deal with Quebec. Hogan had called it the election issue. He argued that the memorandum of understanding between Hydro-Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro could bring $225 billion into the provincial treasury over 50 years. Under the tentative agreement, Hydro-Québec would pay far more for power from the Churchill Falls plant in Labrador, which Quebec's government helped build in the late 1960s. It is also expected to lead to new hydroelectric projects on the Churchill River, and it would end the existing Churchill Falls contract 16 years earlier than planned. That contract has had Hydro-Québec buying most of the electricity at rock-bottom prices for decades.

Wakeham said the draft was not good enough. He promised an independent third-party review, citing lessons from the province's earlier energy project failures, and said its conclusions would be made public. He would use it to fix the deal or demand a better one, and he vowed not to sign anything Newfoundlanders and Labradorians had not approved in a referendum. Hogan, speaking to supporters in St. John's, urged him to stay the course, calling the deal the best opportunity to secure the province's future and saying there was no better deal.

The Liberals also entered the race weakened. Several cabinet ministers, including Siobhan Coady, John Haggie, Gerry Byrne, Andrew Parsons and Tom Osborne, quit before the campaign began. The Tory gains came in rural Newfoundland and across Labrador, extending a trend from the spring, when Pierre Poilievre's federal Conservatives won three rural Newfoundland seats, a gain of two, even as Mark Carney's Liberals won nationally.

Dinn, a 65-year-old former teacher re-elected in his St. John's riding, told supporters the NDP would be the party putting forward ideas to benefit everyone in the province. The party has never held more than five seats.

Wakeham now inherits the file he campaigned against, along with a provincial debt expected to reach almost $20 billion next year, the largest per capita in the country. The independent review of the Hydro-Québec deal and the debt are the first things to watch.