As the night dragged on, the Conservatives working to get Don Stewart elected in the Toronto-St. Paul’s riding were beginning to accept defeat. Logan Stitt, a 16-year-old from Burlington, Ont., who had spent the last few weeks volunteering for the Conservative campaign, left campaign headquarters around midnight.
“It was really stressful to watch the votes come in because it was close,” he said.
During his car ride home, the Liberals were up by about four per cent. Even though it looked like they would lose the race, Stitt felt the campaign had done great work. They had brought the voting gap down from 2021, when the Liberals won with 49 per cent of the votes versus 24 per cent for the Conservatives.
But around 4:30 a.m., the addition of the last batch of ballots delivered the race to Stewart. In the end, Stewart received 42.1 per cent of the votes while Liberal candidate Leslie Church came in second with 40.5 per cent.
Campaign volunteers and Conservative Party strategists describe a highly motivated campaign, with dozens of people from across the Greater Toronto Area helping to secure the unlikely victory.
This was Stewart’s first time running for public office. He spent 19 years at Morgan Stanley and BMO Capital Markets, followed by a short stint at Jenni Byrne + Associates, a public affairs agency run by conservative political strategist Jenni Byrne.
The president of Byrne’s firm, Andrew Kimber, played a central role in Stewart’s campaign management.
“I have to give massive credit to Andrew Kimber and his wife Amanda, who was the local campaign manager, for how they ran this campaign,” said Anthony Koch, former director of communications for Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.
“There’s a reason that up until the very end, Jenni Byrne was on TV saying that we aren’t going to win this,” said Koch, who is today managing principal at AK Strategies, a political consultancy.
“That wasn’t just posturing. This is an extraordinarily Liberal seat. It doesn’t get more Liberal than the 34 seats they won in 2011,” he said, referring to the year Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a resounding majority.
“But people are frustrated with the government on 40 different issues right now. And a swing in support of this magnitude is just the natural course of things, because the government has reached its end.”
Energetic campaign
On July 24, 2023, Carolyn Bennett, member of Parliament for Toronto-St. Paul’s, announced her retirement. Bennett had won the riding in 10 successive elections for the Liberals and represented its constituents for 27 years.
Church, the Liberal candidate vying to replace Bennett, was herself a longtime party insider. She served most recently as chief of staff to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who represents the neighbouring riding of University-Rosedale.
Despite bringing in ministers such as Freeland to campaign in the riding, the Liberals appeared to struggle early on, sources said.
When their vulnerability became clear, the Conservatives saw an opportunity to make big gains in the riding, says Andrew McDougall, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
“There was some chatter about whether this would be closer than it really should be. And you saw the Conservatives beginning to move in and actually invest resources,” he said.
When Stitt, the volunteer, arrived at the campaign office, the staff were gracious and eager to have him start knocking on doors, he says. He was just one of dozens.
“They ran a very effective campaign … We had students knocking on doors, we had people of all different ethnic backgrounds, we had Conservative MPs who were in the area. It was one of the most energetic campaigns I’ve worked on,” said Stitt, who volunteered for Effie Triantafilopoulos’ campaign for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in 2022.
The party’s message resonated with voters at the doors because it corresponds to the concerns of people in the riding, says Matt Olsen, another volunteer on Stewart’s campaign.
“Look at the Conservative slogans like ‘Axe the tax’, ‘Build the homes’, ‘Fix the budget’ and ‘Stop the crime’. You’ve got high-income people that are worried about the capital gains tax and middle-income people that have [anti-theft wheel] boots on their cars because they don’t want them to be stolen,” Olsen said.
“For example, with the ‘Axe the tax’ message, you can use that in a bunch of different scenarios. Obviously it refers to the carbon tax. But it can also refer to capital gains tax if that’s what you want to talk about,” he said.
“We didn’t have people mention things that maybe had stuck around in previous campaigns, like abortion or LGBTQ rights,” said Olsen. “These weren’t pressing criticisms because I think the party has done a really good job of keeping things focused on those four pillars [of taxes, homes, the budget and crime], and it recognizes now that everybody benefits from the sort of things that they’re campaigning on.”
Koch says one of the key reasons for Stewart’s victory was his success with Jewish voters, who make up 11 per cent of the riding. According to Mainstreet Research, a public opinion firm, the Conservatives received three times as many votes from Jewish residents as the Liberals.
“What I want people to understand about Jewish dissatisfaction with the Liberals is that it isn’t just about their lukewarm support for the State of Israel,” Koch said. “The other component, which doesn’t get spoken about enough, is that Canadian Jews are being harassed on the streets by people who are ostensibly their fellow Canadians.”
The Liberals have been weak on condemning antisemitism within Canada, whereas Poilievre “has been lockstep on this issue,” said Koch. “Since October 7, he has stood loud and proud with both Jewish Canadians and the State of Israel.”
Now that the Tories have an elected representative in the heart of Toronto, the party is wondering whether other supposedly safe Liberal ridings are also up for grabs.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty: are the Liberals going to have a new leader, when is an election going to happen?” Koch says.
“But a 26-point swing in a riding like Toronto St-Pauls — even if it’s half of that [in the general election] — a 13-point swing means a bloodbath for Liberal MPs in Toronto. [That’s a] Poilievre majority government right there,” said Koch.
“So the omens are good, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
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