Michael Chong's re-election as Member of Parliament for Wellington-Halton Hills was never in doubt. This was considered a safe seat for the Conservative Party incumbent; Chong has held this seat since 2004. The first polls reporting after 9:30 p.m. showed Chong with a commanding lead over his four opponents that continually strengthened throughout the evening.
With almost all the polls reporting (239 of 240), Chong had garnered 33,918 votes and 52.3% of the popular vote, almost double that of his closest opponent, Melanie Lang of the Liberal Party who collected 17,343 ballots and 26.8% of the vote. Third place went to Noor Jahangir of the NDP who received 6,812 votes and 10.5% of the votes cast. Syl Carle of the Peoples Party of Canada finished in fourth place with 4,247 votes and 6.6%, while Ran Zhu of the Green Party came in last with 3.9% and 2,504 votes.
Nation-wide the election seems to have accomplished very little. The Liberals and Justin Trudeau will form the next government with the backing of the NDP as was the case previously. Trudeau's party gained three seats more than in 2019, finishing with 158 seats. The Conservatives stood pat with 119 seats while again winning the popular vote over the Liberals (34% to 32.4% respectively).
The biggest gain in the popular vote went to PPC who went from about 2% in 2019, to 5.1%, although the party under leader Maxime Bernier failed to win a seat. The Greens did win two seats, one of them in Kitchener, however the party saw its popular support plummet from 6.5% in the previous election to 2.3% this time. Green Party leader Annamie Paul lost her bid for a seat and finished in fourth place in Toronto Centre.
Those results seem to be mirrored on a local level. In 2019, Green Party with candidate Ralph Martin running in Wellington-Halton Hills 2019 finished in third place ahead of the NDP with 12.7% of the vote. In this election, NDP candidate Noor Jahanger slipped back into third place in the pack, while the bottom dropped out for Green candidate Ran Zhu getting only 3.9% of the votes cast.
Contrarily, Wellington-Halton Hills PPC candidate Syl Carle, running in his second election, made some big gains finished solidly in fourth place with 4,247 votes and 6.6% support of the electorate, up from 2.2% in 2019.
Michael Chong will again be returning to Parliament Hill as the member from Wellington-Halton Hills with overwhelming support from voters. In the big picture, not much has changed, Canadians went to bed under a Liberal minority government and woke up with the same scenario about to be replayed.
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