(Sept 17): 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%, while Liberal candidate Laura Palestini had 27.2%. A candidate for the New Democratic Party, Craig Sauve, received 26.1%.

In 2021, the Liberals won LaSalle-Emard-Verdun easily, finishing more than 20 percentage points ahead of the Bloc Quebecois. The seat became open when former justice minister David Lametti, who was ousted from Trudeau’s cabinet, decided to leave politics. 

As Trudeau has fallen out of favour with voters, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives have seized the momentum in national polling. Most surveys over the past year have shown the Conservatives leading by a wide margin — as much as 20 percentage points — which would hand Poilievre a large majority government if carried through to election day. 

But so far, there has been no sign that Trudeau intends to resign. The prime minister appears to have the support of the majority of his 154-member caucus, and ahead of Monday’s byelection he brushed aside repeated questions about leaving office, insisting he’s eager to go head-to-head with Poilievre in a national contest.

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