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The Ontario Liberals received two electoral shots in the arm on Thursday as Stephen Blais and Lucille Collard easily won byelections to retain long-held seats for the party in the neighbouring Ottawa-Orléans and Ottawa-Vanier ridings.

Those victories increased the Liberals’ allotment of seats in the Legislature to eight among 124 overall.

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The Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford still holds a solid majority with 73 seats. The NDP, led by Andrea Horwath, has official Opposition status with 40. There are also one Green MPP, party leader Mike Schreiner in Guelph riding, and two independents.

“There’s a lot of work ahead, of course. We’ve got the convention to elect a new leader, so that will be important work,” Collard said. “After that, we’ll be continuing the construction of our party. We need to bring in more people, we need to have many, many, many more conversations with all the residents of Ontario. We’re going to rebuild the party that’s going to be very strong, that people can identify with, so I’m very confident that the Liberal party is in no way at its end, that it’s regaining momentum.”