New Liberal MPP Stephen Blais, Liberal interim leader John Fraser, and new Liberal MPP Lucille Collard celebrate the byelection victories in Orleans and Ottawa-Vanier. Photo by Charlie Pinkerton/iPolitics

The Ontario Liberals retained two of their traditional strongholds in byelections in Ottawa on Thursday.

Voters in Ottawa-Vanier elected lawyer and longtime school board trustee Lucille Collard as their MPP, while councillor Stephen Blais won the byelection in Orleans.

Once the byelection victories were firmly in the Liberals’ grasps, Collard, Blais and Liberal interim leader John Fraser addressed a crowd at a victory party at Gloucester’s Crust and Crate restaurant, issuing a message to Progressive Conservative (PC) Premier Doug Ford to watch out.

While neither riding has strayed from Grit red since 2003, both new MPPs improved the party’s vote share compared to their predecessors in the last provincial election.

With 98 per cent of polls in Ottawa-Vanier reporting, Collard had won 52 per cent of the vote. Former MPP Nathalie Des Rosiers, whose stepping down prompted the byelection, won 43 per cent of the vote in 2018. The PC vote share fell almost 10 percentage points, from 21 per cent in the last election to 12 per cent on Thursday.

With 95 per cent of polls in Orleans reporting, Blais had won 55 per cent of the vote, a leap from the 39 per cent that former MPP Marie-France Lalonde won the seat with for the Liberals in 2018. In Orleans, PC support was down from 35 per cent to 23 per cent.

“It’s momentum, it feels good,” Fraser said. “But we just got to get back to work, get back to Queen’s Park next week and then the leadership convention and we’ve just got to keep going.”

Questioned about how serious of a message the results could be signalling to the government given the consistency of Liberal success in both ridings, Collard said “if anyone wanted to change something, it would have been now.”

Together, the MPPs stressed their intention to continue rallying for Liberal Party sticking points – limiting cuts to social programs including healthcare and education, and protecting the environment.

Collard and Blais’s victories bring the Liberals’ total number of seats at Queen’s Park to eight, which under the pre-Ford formula would have been enough MPPs to grant the party official party status. Official party status would qualify the party to receive funds for things like research, staff salaries and grant them the right to greater participation in the legislature, including in question period.

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The Liberals are still four seats short under the new official party status metric. Shortly after they were elected, the PCs raised the required number of MPPs in the legislature necessary to qualify for official party status to 12, with then PC House Leader Todd Smith reasoning that it was to reflect 10 per cent of members of the expanded legislature. Fraser accused the government of changing the requirements intentionally to block the Liberals from qualifying.

Collard says she plans to be a “strong voice” a Queen’s Park in the absence of the Liberals’ official party status.

“I can make the government accountable for what they’re doing,” Collard said, who added that she plans to focus on issues in her riding.

“I’ve been to a lot of doors, I’ve met a lot of people. I understand what they want and I want to continue that work to really understand what the priorities are so that I can push those. The work will be in the riding, mostly, and I’ll do everything I can at Queen’s Park working with my colleagues,” Collard said.

Blais said similarly that he will prioritize the people in his riding, including advocating for Ottawa Regional Road 174 to be transferred back to the province so it can be upgraded to relieve traffic congestion, and that the City of Ottawa can save money.

The Liberals have been polling strongly as of late, and could get a boost from the conclusion of their leadership race in early March. Former provincial cabinet minister Steven Del Duca is expected to win the contest after the Liberals’ announced early this month that he had won 56 per cent of the elected delegates that will ultimately determine who becomes the next leader at the party’s convention in Mississauga on March 7.

Asked about her role in the party’s rebuild following its catastrophic results in the last election, Collard said the Liberals have “a great opportunity.”

“Right now it’s all about making yourself heard, having conversations with the people and making sure that the party is being reconstructed according to the values of the people,” Collard said.

Del Duca published a statement on the byelections on his website.

“Today, voters in Ottawa­­—Vanier and Orléans sent a clear message to Doug Ford and elected two strong community champions in Stephen Blais and Lucille Collard,” he said. “Stephen and Lucille ran exceptionally strong campaigns that focused on education, healthcare and Doug Ford’s failed record in Ontario. I know they will be strong advocates for their community and the City of Ottawa.”

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Collard graduated from the University of Ottawa in 1999 and has spent her career as a lawyer in the public service. According to her website, her work as a federal lawyer has touched areas including international trade administrative and regulatory law with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Collard was first elected to public office in 2010 as school trustee for the Ottawa-Rockcliffe seat on Eastern Ontario’s French school board. She won subsequent school board elections in 2014 and 2018 as well.

Blais is a graduate of the University of Ottawa’s political science program and previously worked in provincial politics as a ministerial staffer. He was first elected councillor of Cumberland in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014 and 2018. He’s most recently been the chair of city council’s transportation committee. Blais was previously a school trustee as well, but unlike Collard he sat on the city’s Catholic school board.

The Ottawa-Vanier byelection was called after Des Rosiers stepped down to become principal of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Des Rosiers herself was first elected in a byelection in 2016. Aside from a two-year period when it was represented by an independent Claudette Boyer – who earlier was a Liberal MPP) – the seat has not been out of the party’s control in close to half a century.

On the opposite side of the city, it was Lalonde’s resignation as MPP to run for federal Parliament that brought about the byelection in the riding of Orleans. Lalonde had been elected for the first time to Queen’s Park in 2014. In the fall’s federal election, she won the overlapping seat that had previously been held by Liberal MP Andrew Leslie, who chose not to run again for the Liberals. Orleans has been red provincially since 2003.

Both Des Rosiers and Lalonde stepped down last year.

The Liberals recently added another MPP to their ranks, with Amanda Simard joining the party this year after splitting with the PCs. Simard, who represents the Eastern Ontario riding of Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, fell out of favour with the governing party within months of the PCs forming government. The brunt of her beef with the party were focussed on the PCs dealings with French-language policy. She left the party shortly after it announced it would cease work on a French-language university (which the PCs later back-pedalled from), and also took issue with the PCs pledge to eliminate the position of French Language Services Commissioner.

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