Canada’s Trudeau faces pressure to quit as Liberals lose election in PM’s hometown, Montreal
The loss, coupled with a recent Toronto defeat, signals waning support for Trudeau, who faces a challenging re-election campaign
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suffered a big political setback as his Liberal Party lost a special election in a Montreal district that until recently had been considered safe ground for him.
The defeat will raise the pressure on the 52-year-old leader to step aside before the next election, which is scheduled for October 2025 but may happen earlier than that.
It’s the second significant defeat at the ballot box in just a few months for his party. In June, voters elected a Conservative Party candidate to represent an area of Toronto that had previously been a Liberal stronghold. Now they’ve rejected the Liberals again in the electoral district of LaSalle-Emard-Verdun in Montreal, Trudeau’s hometown.
The losses in the country’s two largest cities are an unmistakable sign of trouble for the prime minister, whose political base is heavily concentrated in urban centres.
The special election was won by Louis-Philippe Sauve of the Bloc Quebecois, a political party that advocates for Quebec’s interests in Ottawa and runs candidates only in that province.
As with the Toronto special election more than two months ago, this one was close: Sauve won by just 248 votes, according to preliminary results posted by Elections Canada. He wound up with 28 per cent, while Liberal candidate Laura Palestini had 27.2 per cent. A candidate for the New Democratic Party, Craig Sauve, received 26.1 per cent.
