Carney says byelection wins a vote of confidence in his U.S.-Canada trade strategy

OTTAWA — In the final hours of byelection voting on Monday, Conservative candidate Jim Syrbos made one last appeal to the people of Beaches-East York: send a clear message to Ottawa and to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government.

But that was not the message Carney received after the votes were counted in all three ridings up for grabs.

“The message from Canadians, I think, is clear. They’ve given their support — more than 50 per cent in each of these ridings — to the government’s plan and I think that’s because Canadians are united and Canadians are ready,” Carney said on Tuesday in Ottawa.

“We’ve been buying Canadian, we’ve been visiting Canada, we have been reinforcing our strength here at home and diversifying our partnerships abroad. That’s been the plan of the government since the start.”

The Liberals swept three byelections on Monday by a wide margin. In Toronto’s Beaches-East York and in North Vancouver-Capilano, the governing party was widely expected to sail to victory.

Carney’s former deputy chief of staff Braeden Caley held the Vancouver seat with 58.6 per cent of the vote, and constituency worker Tanveer Shahnawaz comfortably kept Beaches-East York in Liberal hands with 55.7 per cent of the vote.

The NDP made some progress in the Toronto riding, where candidate Shannon Devine took 25.8 per cent of the vote on Monday night — up from the 6.9 per cent she earned in last year’s general election.

Many expected Chicoutimi-Le Fjord to be a different story. In April 2025, the popular Conservative Richard Martel eked out his fourth election win by just three percentage points, with the Bloc Québécois and Liberal candidates separated by only a handful of votes.

Dairy farmer Daniel Gobeil won 51.3 per cent of the vote for the Liberals in Chicoutimi-Le Fjord on Monday — about 18 points ahead of the Bloc candidate Caroline Dubé.

“This is something that sends a strong message about the strength of the Liberals in Quebec right now, and also about how people are concerned about the trade war,” said Daniel Béland, a professor of political science at McGill University.

The province has been hit hard by U.S. tariffs targeting key industries such as aluminum, forestry and supply-managed dairy.

The Conservative vote collapsed in the Quebec riding on Monday, with Régis Gaudreault finishing almost 39 points behind Gobeil.

“It looks very bad for the Conservatives, and again, it will feed all this debate about the future of Pierre Poilievre as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada,” said Béland, who is also director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

The Conservative leader had not made any public comment on the byelection results as of Monday afternoon.

Questions have been asked about Poilievre’s future as leader since the April 2025 election.

He propelled the Tories to a 20-point lead in national polls in late 2024, pushed Justin Trudeau out of the Prime Minister’s Office and forced Carney to scrap the unpopular consumer carbon price as soon as he took over as Liberal leader.

But the Conservative camp struggled to adjust to the seismic political shift caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s continuous threats against Canadian sovereignty and the resulting spike in both patriotism and anger north of the border.

Poilievre lost his longtime Ottawa-area seat in the election. He spent that spring watching from the sidelines as caucus members sought to poke holes in Carney’s credibility in Parliament, and spent the summer campaigning in a safe Conservative riding in rural Alberta.

By fall, with the leader back in his House of Commons seat, the Conservatives seemed more settled — until, one by one, four MPs walked across the aisle to join Carney’s government.

A trio of byelection wins last April secured for the Liberals the majority status they’d failed to lock up a year earlier.

Gobeil will add one more vote to the Liberal ranks, provided the Liberals don’t lose ground in any of the byelections set to come in the next several months.

There are five more vacancies already waiting to be filled — one in Ontario, one in Saskatchewan and three in Quebec. A sixth is expected later this month when Conservative Larry Brock steps down from his Ontario riding, which he said would happen Sept. 18.

Carney has not yet set dates for any of these races.

Béland said while byelections tend to focus more on local issues, he expects that won’t be the case with the upcoming votes.

“The evolution of that trade debate and Canada-U.S. relations and how Mark Carney is handling the situation will also affect the outcome,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 1, 2026.

Sarah Ritchie and David Baxter, The Canadian Press