Above photo: Bob Zimmer giving his opening address during the virtual All Candidates Forum hosted by the Chambers of Commerce in the Northeast, with tech support by the Tumbler Ridge Chamber. He was one of three candidates that showed up for the debate.
The votes have (mostly) been counted), the dust has settled and Bob Zimmer is once again the MP for the Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies region.
Results are still preliminary. As we were going to press, this note was still on the Elections Canada website: “Due to the high turnout in this election, particularly by those voting by special ballot and at advance polls, more time is needed to count the ballots while ensuring our integrity checks are done.”
Final results should be out by the time the paper is printed and back in town, just in time for this story to be completely out of date. (On that topic, Keith Bertrand won the by-election by one vote. That recount happened hours after the paper went to press. Congratulations, Keith.)
While the Liberal candidate was tied with Bob Zimmer after the first poll reported with ten votes apiece, by the time the second poll Zimmer had over 80 percent of the vote.
That lead slowly dropped to 71.3 percent as of press time, but that’s still enough to handily hand Zimmer the victory, even though results had yet to be tabulated for 15 polls.
In second place was Liberal Peter Njenga with 19.3 percent of the counted vote.
He was followed by Cory Longley of the NDP, with six percent of the vote, Mary Forbes of the Green Party with 2.1 percent of the vote and finally David Watson of the PPC, with 1.3 percent of the vote.
While a number of polls still hadn’t been counted, 51,750 people in the riding voted, of the 88,784 eligible voters, which means 58.29 percent of eligible voters turned out to vote.
The actual number of voters is up from the 49,627 last election but the percentage is down from 62.1 to 58.29 percent of the total population of the riding.
Federally, the Liberal party jumped to an early lead, and held that for the entire night, managing to take 168 of the 343 seats.
They needed 172 for a majority government, and will most likely have to form a coalition with another party.
After the 2021 election, the Liberals signed a Supply and Confidence agreement with the NDP, agreeing to work together on confidence votes as well as the budget.
Currently, the NDP have seven seats, and the Liberals might once again turn to them to support the minority government.
The NDP were the big losers in this election, falling from 25 seats in 2021 to seven in 2025.
The Bloc Quebecois also lost seats, dropping from 32 to 23.
Strategic voting probably played a large part in this election, with much of the NDP vote going to the Liberals, who picked up eight seats, going from 160 to 168 seats overall.
The Conservatives also gained seats, from 119 seats in 2021 to 144 this election.
Finally, the Green Party lost one of their two seats, with leader Elizabeth May the only party member to be elected to parliament.
She joins Liberal leader Mark Carney and Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet as the only party leaders to be elected.
Jagmeet Singh stepped down as leader of the NDP immediately upon losing his riding of Burnaby Central to Liberal Wade Chan. Singh came in third behind Conservative James Yan. The NDP also lost official party status.
Also unelected? Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre, who lost his riding to Liberal Peter Fanjoy.
Pollievre has said he plans on staying on as leader of the Federal Conservatives.
Across the country, 19.2 million people showed up to vote, or 67.35 percent of eligible voters. That’s up from 62.2 percent in 2021.
Again, these results are preliminary.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
