KAPUSKASING - The close race in Mushkegowuk-James Bay shows people are ready for a change, says PC candidate Dave Plourde.
The unofficial results from Elections Ontario for the Feb. 27 vote show NDP incumbent Guy Bourgouin with 3,606 votes (45.4 per cent) and Plourde with 3,602 votes (45.35 per cent). The candidates are still waiting to hear if there will be a recount in the riding.
“I would have much rather had a landslide, obviously. That would make you feel a lot better,” Plourde told TimminsToday.
“I do feel good that the PCs have a majority, though. That’s what the intent was.”
Under Ontario’s election rules, a returning officer must apply for a recount if the difference between the top two candidates is fewer than 25 votes.
Elections Ontario is waiting for the official tabulation process before determining the next steps. That is happening March 1-3.
Plourde said he plans to ask for a recount.
“We’re going to wait and see if we’re granted a recount, and then we’ll go from there. I mean, we’re just waiting. It’s a waiting game until it actually happens,” he said.
“I’m optimistic that we’ll find those four votes. It is just four votes, so it’s really not hard to imagine that we’ll be able to find those four votes.”
SEE: Recount 'likely' in Mushkegowuk-James Bay
Plourde would have preferred not to have a four-point spread.
“But the fact that it's so close means that people are ready for change. And I think that's indicative of what happened,” he said.
“I just couldn’t convince enough. And we worked till the last, last person. I would have liked to see a 100-point spread, but just couldn’t get that.”
Plourde is proud of how his campaign was run.
“I think we kept the campaign really clean. We didn’t troll people. We just made sure we gave them facts, and we did everything we could to make sure that we stayed on the straight and narrow,” he said.
“There was lots of back and forth and stuff on Facebook. We just didn’t answer anything. Just kept going. And if anybody had questions, we answered them. We called them up and addressed whatever questions they had, but we didn’t allow the trolls to get the best of us.”
The unofficial results show that voter turnout was up in the riding.
SEE: Voter turnout was up in these two Northern ridings
There were 18,755 registered voters on the list in Mushkegowuk-James Bay and 7,943 votes were cast. In the 2022 election, the local voter turnout was 39.40 per cent, with 7,283 voters.
“Compared to the last election, there were more people that got out and voted … Better than the last election, considering that even now, it is winter, and you tend to see a low voter turnout in the winter,” he said.
What happens when there’s a recount?
The Ontario Election Act lays out how a recount goes. Within four days (excluding Sunday) of the returning officer's official tabulation, a judge may name a time and place to recount votes.
There are three situations when a recount can happen — if a deputy returning officer has improperly counted or rejected ballots or made an incorrect statement about the number of votes for a candidate, if the returning officer improperly tabulated the votes, and if there are fewer than 25 votes between the first- and second-place candidates.
The recount has to be held within 10 days of the judge hearing the application.
A recount is done manually, even though vote-counting equipment is used on election day.
There is one other riding that also has less than a 25-vote margin.
In Mississauga-Erin Mills, after the unofficial polls, the PC candidate is 20 votes ahead of the Liberal candidate.
Recounts in Ontario provincial elections are rare. Since 1975, there have been 17 recounts across eight elections, with only two occurring in Northern Ontario — in Cochrane North in 1981 and Thunder Bay-Atikokan in 2007.
