Conservative vows to hold Liberals’ feet to the fire

He is hoping for another election in 18-24 months giving the Conservatives another chance at forming government.

“I’m so fortunate. I have a fantastic team. They work hard each and every day,” said Dowdall, adding that his team put up 1,800 signs – more than ever before – despite losing a part of the riding in a redistribution process.

He thanked family, friends, municipal politicians past and present – including former colleagues from when he was mayor and councillor in Essa Township – and the party stalwarts.

“It is a stressful time,” said Dowdall. “I’ve been in a lot of elections. This is the first one that I didn’t really know what the outcome would be. In all the other ones I could predict to a number and that’s just because there are so many new people who voted this time. I want to thank those who did vote, a lot of the new families. We’ll continue to get the message out there. We’re going to go to Ottawa and we’re going to represent each and every one of you. Come to my office and hopefully we’ll solve some of those issuesthat we do have but if we don’t, from the look of the numbers there’s going to be an election coming. I hope everyone still wants to be part of the team because the next time, we’re going to be champions.”

Dowdall told The Echo he didn’t necessarily see the Conservatives performing better than expected in some ridings to stop the Liberals from getting a majority as a victory but said, “I think it gives us an opportunity, being a minority. They are going to have to pass legislation that is going to have to be acceptable to some other parties in the House. The NDP doesn’t have a whole lot of seats as we can see, and the Bloc doesn’t look as powerful as they once were, so for us it’s an opportunity to hopefully bring some issues together, and hopefully be able to help Canadians.”

“We had campaigned on hope, I thought, that there would be a change,” he said adding that they found young people are feeling very frustrated with the Liberals for their inability to get ahead, or buy a house.

“Those are issues all parties have heard so hopefully there are some solutions there but we do have fundamental differences as parties.”

He points to spending and fiscal responsibility.

“We do have difference of opinions on how we get there but I think we did hear a lot of the same issues,” said Dowdall.

Across town, Liberal supporters were gathered at Black Bellows Brewing Company in support of Bren Munro.

Munro is happy to see the Liberals forming the next government, but had hoped for a stronger mandate.

“A minority government will make it harder to get things done, but people in the north believed [Mark] Carney was the best leader to deal with Trump,” she said.

She said she is proud of the campaign she ran, a big improvement over the 2021 election when she finished more than 15,000 votes back.

“We had more than 200 volunteers and 1,000 signs in the ground,” Munro told The Echo. “This was the first time in 20 years that a Liberal candidate has run twice, so we were able to build a solid base.”

Liberal organizers were hopeful that riding redistribution (with historically conservative areas at the south of the riding being lopped off) and the influx of new voters from the GTA since the last election would make a difference.

Munro says this will be her last federal election campaign, but she is leaving the riding in good shape for the next candidate.

Some of the loudest cheering erupted when it was announced that Poilievre lost to the Liberal challenger in his Ottawa area riding of Carleton.

“I am so sick of hearing Poilievre say Canada is broken,” said Munro. “I hope to never hear his voice again.”

Poilievre has since indicated that he intends to stay on as party leader.

Munro said voter turnout at advance polls in Simcoe-Grey was among the highest in the country, suggesting people were very concerned about the outcome. Elections Canada’s preliminary count shows 29,777 people voted in the riding by April 24.

At 68.7 per cent, there was a high voter turnout across the county and Simcoe-Grey was even higher at 71.9 per cent, with 68,433 of 95,169 registered electors voting, not including electors who registered on election day.

– With files from Bonnie MacPherson.

(This reporting is based on preliminary results posted by Elections Canada as of May 1.)