Chris Zwick – Leader Staff
Arnold Viersen has reclaimed his seat as Member of Parliament and will return to Ottawa as the representative of the Peace River-Westlock riding when Parliament resumes.
The incumbent Conservative MP didn’t have any trouble defeating his competitors in the Oct. 21 federal election, with voters giving the Neerlandia native a healthy second mandate with 80.7 per cent of the vote. NDP candidate Jennifer Villebrun was in second with 7.5 per cent; Liberal Leslie Penny had 6.0 per cent; People’s Party John Schrader with 3.1 per cent and the Green Party’s Peter Nygaard with 2.7 per cent.
Nationally, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party will form a minority government winning 157 ridings. Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party had 121. The Bloc Quebecois had 32 seats; the NDP had 24, the Greens had three, with former Liberal justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was at the centre of the SNC-Lavalin controversy that dogged Trudeau and the Liberals for the last year. She won her Vancouver riding as an independent candidate.
“It looks like we were successful in Peace-River-Westlock,” Viersen told an assembled crowd of supporters at the Barrhead Legion, soon after it became apparent he would remain MP for Peace River-Westlock.
“I thank my wife for standing with me through this. She always says I’m not the man she married. To some degree that is true, there wasn’t a political bone in my body when we got married but two-and-a-half years later I was running for office … The election results were not what we were hoping for. We were hoping for a strong, stable, majority government and that’s not what we have received this evening. So we will be back as a minority, most likely for the Liberals, he said.
Trudeau won his Montreal-Papineau riding in Quebec, while Scheer won his Saskatchewan riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle. Green Party leader Elizabeth May won her Saanich–Gulf Islands riding in B.C., and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh won in Burnaby South. Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet won in Beloeil-Chambly in Quebec while People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier lost his Beauce seat in Quebec, the only major party leader to lose his own riding.
All but one of Alberta’s 34 federal ridings went blue as well, with the NDP stronghold of Edmonton-Strathcona remaining orange, with Heather McPherson taking 46.9 per cent of the votes and Conservative candidate Sam Lilly taking 38 per cent. McPherson took over from long-time NDP MP Linda Duncan who retired after representing the riding since 2008.
In the neighbouring riding of Lakeland, incumbent Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs won handily with 83.3 per cent of the vote. In Fort McMurray-Cold Lake Conservative incumbent David Yurdiga took 78.5 per cent of the vote, while Conservative incumbent Chris Warkentin won 83.4 per cent of the vote.
In Yellowhead, Conservative Gerald Soroka won 81.4 per cent and in Sturgeon River-Parkland incumbent Conservative Dane Lloyd earned 77.2 per cent.
NDP candidates in the above ridings placed second, all with less than 10 per cent of the vote.
Viersen said he and the Conservatives will continue to support the fight to get pipelines built in Canada and getting rid of the Liberals carbon tax.
“With or without government our voices will not be diminished,” he said.
“I look forward to representing the people of Northern Alberta and continuing to fight for forestry and farming that happens up here. I will continue to fight for our way of life and continue to enjoy the freedoms that we do enjoy in Canada and try to get the economy rolling one way or another.”
Viersen said that while he recognized that minority governments are “notoriously unpredictable,” he will continue to stand by Scheer.
“Given the other options we had, he was the best option we had and I look forward to rallying the base and look forward to getting a strong Conservative government when the time comes,” he said.
-with files from Barry Kerton
