For the first time in two decades, voters in the Cowichan Valley will be sending a right-wing Member of Parliament to Ottawa.
Conservative candidate Jeff Kibble defeated NDP incumbent Alistair MacGregor garnering 37.3 of the vote in Monday’s federal election.
Kibble received 27,912 votes to MacGregor’s 24,462, a margin of 3,450 votes. Liberal candidate Blair Herbert finished third with 28.1 per cent of the vote. The Green Party’s Kathleen Code was fourth with two per cent.
Late Monday night, Kibble described his victory as truly remarkable.
“We have no more NDP here in the Cowichan Valley,” Kibble commented. “The Liberals will have a minority government and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
“We will hold them to account to make sure our country is going in the right direction.”
MacGregor, who has held the seat for the NDP since 2015 was disappointed, but he acknowledged the outcome the party had feared became a reality.
“We were the victim of a split vote,” MacGregor said.
In the waning days of the campaign, the NDP message became one of encouraging voters not to vote Liberal for fear of clearing a path for the Conservatives.
Clearly, that’s what happened.
The combined NDP/Liberal vote accounted for more than 60 per cent of the vote but Kibble was comfortably ahead when the votes were counted.
The last time Cowichan elected a right-wing candidate was in 2000 when Reed Elley of the Alliance Party won in what was then the Nanaimo-Cowichan riding. Elley won as a Reform candidate in 1997. In both elections, Elley won handily, earning about 45 per cent of the popular vote.
Elley retired in 2004 and the NDP’s Jean Crowder, a popular former Municipal of North Cowichan councillor, won with 43 per cent of the vote. Crowder held the Nanaimo-Cowichan seat for the NDP through the next three elections winning with wide margins in 2006, 2008 and 2011.
In 2011 she defeated another former North Cowichan councillor, John Koury, by more than 10 percentage points. She beat Elley by eight points in 2008.
Voter turnout was strong in Cowichan-Malahat-Langford with almost 71.5 of registered voters casting ballots.
On the national scene, by early Tuesday morning it was clear Mark Carney’s Liberals would form the next government, but whether it would be a minority or a majority government was still up in the air.
The Liberals had won or were leading in 168 seats, four short of the number required for a majority. However, CBC reported that at least five seats in which Conservatives or NDP candidates were leading could still swing to the Liberals. On Tuesday morning the Conservatives were leading or had been declared winners in 144 ridings. The NDP total was seven, meaning the party would lose its official party status.