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

On election night in St. John's, Tony Wakeham stood before his supporters and talked about basketball. He has spent more than 30 years coaching the game, he said, and the lesson is that no statistic matters less than the score at halftime. A couple of months earlier, he told the crowd, plenty of people had looked at that halftime score and decided the election was over. Then his Progressive Conservatives won it.

Voters in Newfoundland and Labrador on Tuesday ended ten years of Liberal government and gave the Tories a slim majority. The count was a see-saw. The PCs edged into a small lead as the final ballots came in, then steadily pulled ahead of Premier John Hogan's Liberals, who had been seeking a fourth consecutive term.

Three hours after the polls closed, the Progressive Conservatives had won 21 of the legislature's 40 ridings, a gain of seven. The Liberals held 15, a loss of six. The New Democrats, led by Jim Dinn, 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 against 43.43 per cent for the Liberals.

The narrowest race was in Lewisporte–Twillingate, where Tory candidate Mark Butt beat Liberal Derek Bennett by 18 votes. Under provincial law, a margin of 10 votes or fewer triggers an automatic recount, so that result sits just outside the threshold.

Wakeham, a former health-care bureaucrat, said he won voters over by returning again and again to health care, crime and pocketbook issues. He repeatedly asked people whether they were better off under the Liberals. The shift fits a pattern 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 the federal election. On Tuesday the provincial PCs added seats in rural Newfoundland and across Labrador. The Liberal campaign had also been weakened before it began by the departures of several cabinet ministers: Siobhan Coady, John Haggie, Gerry Byrne, Andrew Parsons and Tom Osborne.

The defining issue was a proposed multibillion-dollar energy deal with Quebec. Hogan, a 47-year-old lawyer, called it "the election issue." The memorandum of understanding between Hydro-Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, he argued, could bring $225 billion into the provincial treasury over 50 years. It would have Hydro-Québec pay much more for power from the Churchill Falls plant in Labrador, which Quebec's government helped build in the late 1960s, and would lead to new hydroelectric projects on the Churchill River. It would also end the current Churchill Falls contract 16 years earlier than expected, ending an arrangement in which Hydro-Québec buys most of the electricity at rock-bottom prices.

Wakeham said the draft agreement was not good enough. Pointing to lessons from the province's earlier energy project failures, he promised an independent third-party review with its conclusions shared publicly. He said he would use it to fix the deal or demand a better one, and that he would sign nothing that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians had not approved in a referendum. In his own concession-night remarks, Hogan urged Wakeham to "stay the course," calling the deal the best chance to secure the province's future and saying there was no better one.

Wakeham also inherits a debt expected to reach almost $20 billion next year, the largest per capita of any province. 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, though the party has never held more than five seats. The first test for the new government will be the Churchill Falls review and what it means for the Hydro-Québec agreement.