Conservatives riding high after a lopsided victory in Durham federal byelection

Conservative candidate Jamil Jivani, a commentator and activist, scored a sizable victory in a federal byelection Monday — a lopsided result the Tories are spinning as an ominous sign for the Liberals in the Greater Toronto Area.

Jivani claimed about 57 per cent of the vote compared to 22.5 per cent for his closest competitor — Liberal candidate and local ward councillor Robert Rock — in this suburban-rural riding east of Oshawa, Ont., on the outskirts of the province's Golden Horseshoe region.

«There's really no other way to describe it, the byelection results were terrible for Mr. Trudeau and his Liberal Party,» Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner said in a Tuesday blog post.

«It was a major, historic routing in a riding in vote-rich southern Ontario. In the boxing world, this would be the electoral equivalent of a decisive K.O.»

Rempel Garner added that every Liberal incumbent «in the blast radius of Durham with any modicum of sense left should realize this is very, very bad news.»

In a social media post, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre touted Jivani's vote count as «the best result in Durham of any candidate since the Conservative Party merged 20 years ago.»

Jivani, the son of an African immigrant who graduated from a U.S. Ivy League university, got «no easy breaks» and will be a «champion of working people,» Poilievre said.

«He'll help me axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime,» Poilievre said, referring to promises to scrap the federal carbon levy and take a harder line on crime.

It's Poilievre's promise to «build the homes» that may have had the greatest appeal to voters in this Toronto-adjacent riding.

In Clarington, Ont., one of Durham's population centres, home prices have nearly doubled