Liberal wins rural Newfoundland riding by 12 votes in federal election

ST. JOHN’S — A Liberal candidate won by just 12 votes in a rural Newfoundland riding that was among three white-knuckle Atlantic Canadian races in Monday’s federal election.

Anthony Germain said he was distracting himself with a game of Scrabble Tuesday evening when his neighbours in Salvage, N.L., knocked on his door to congratulate him on his win in the Terra Nova — The Peninsulas riding. He’d been waiting all day for results in the neck-and-neck race against Conservative Jonathan Rowe.

“It was really a question of sitting back and realizing that I had done everything I could do, the team had done everything that they could do,” Germain, a former CBC journalist, said in an interview Tuesday.

His narrow win will trigger a judicial recount of the roughly 41,000 ballots cast in his vast central Newfoundland riding, according to Elections Canada rules.

“That can be a very long, lengthy process, and it’ll take some time,” he said. “I’m prepared for that. But I’m really also delighted that in our system, I’ve won.”

Germain’s win confirms the Liberal party’s dominance of Atlantic Canada with 25 seats. The Conservatives won the remaining seven seats and the NDP were once again shut out of the region.

Donald Wright, a political science professor at the University of New Brunswick, said many traditional NDP voters shifted their support to Liberal candidates to block advances by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

“NDP voters were voting strategically,” Wright said in an interview Tuesday.

The neck-and-neck race in the central Newfoundland riding began shortly after polls closed on Monday night, with Rowe looking likely to win. However, a surge of ballots favouring Germain were tallied and reported later in the night, and Germain was ahead by just 46 votes as of 2 a.m., with one polling station left to report.

The federal voting regular also declared a winner in another neck-and-neck Atlantic Canada race on Tuesday: Conservative Mike Dawson beat Liberal Lisa Harris in eastern New Brunswick’s Miramichi—Grand Lake riding by 394 votes.

In Nova Scotia, Tory incumbent Chris d’Entremont — a well-known former provincial politician — won Acadie-Annapolis by 533 votes, defeating Liberal challenger Ronnie LeBlanc, another former provincial politician and fisherman.

The neck-and-neck race in Germain’s riding was part of a large area of rural Newfoundland that saw a surge in Conservative support. The region is home to fishing towns, growing coastal tourism and communities largely employed by the province’s offshore oil industry.

Voters there faced a difficult decision, he said: to believe the Liberals and their leader Mark Carney that they were best suited to take on United States President Donald Trump, or to believe Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s message that it was time for change.

Some voters connected to the oil and gas industry also believed the Liberals were hostile to energy development, Germain said.

The results in Newfoundland, and in the rest of Atlantic Canada, reinforced the split between mainly Liberal urban ridings and Tory rural ridings, a trend seen across the country, Wright said.

In New Brunswick, the Liberals dominated in Fredericton, Saint John and Moncton — the province’s largest cities — while the Tories held on to their rural seats in the southern and western reaches of the province. As usual, the Liberals held the mainly French-speaking Acadian ridings in the north.

“It can lead to political polarization,” he said. Rural ridings take up a lot of space on the electoral map, though their populations are much smaller than tiny, densely-packed urban areas, he noted.

“If rural voters look at a map and see mostly blue (Conservative ridings), they’ll say, ‘Why are we being dominated by these urban, middle-class, educated elites in places like Fredericton?'” he said. “That can lead to feelings of isolation … As a long-term trend, it’s not good.”

Germain said he was particularly proud to represent a rural riding, and he vowed to be a member of Parliament “who brings Newfoundland to Ottawa, and not Ottawa to Newfoundland.”

The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, won a minority government in Monday’s election, with a total of 169 seats.

— With files from Michael MacDonald in Halifax

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2025.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press