Perth-Wellington voters once again bucked the provincial trend that put a Liberal majority government in power, re-electing incumbent Conservative MPP Randy Pettapiece to represent the riding.
In a provincial result most observers viewed with surprise, the Liberals were re-elected on June 12, improving from minority status to a majority government with 59 seats, while the Tory tally fell by 10 seats to 27 and the NDP held steady at 21.
Final pre-election polls had shown the Conservatives and Liberals in a virtual dead heat, with the NDP only a few percentage points behind.
In Perth-Wellington, Pettapiece captured 39 per cent of the votes, with a total of 15,966, compared to 13,410 (32%) for Liberal Stewart Skinner, who finished second.
Pettapiece’s margin of victory was considerably wider than his first win in the 2011 election, when he beat incumbent Liberal John Wilkinson by just over 200 votes.
In an interview with the Wellington Advertiser at the Kin Station in Listowel on election night, Pettapiece, a Listowel resident and a former North Perth councillor, said he hopes to continue his work of the past three years.
“I hope (to have) the same role I’ve had before,” he said. “As far as critic roles I certainly enjoyed what I was doing in rural affairs and horse racing. Also, I see my role in opposition as doing what I have been doing – and that’s representing the constituents of Perth-Wellington as well as I can.”
Skinner acknowledged his opponent’s electoral accomplishments in remarks after the results came in on election night.
“It was always going to be difficult,” Skinner said. “I mean Randy managed to beat John Wilkinson, a cabinet minister, in the 2011 election. And I was a 30-year-old from Listowel that nobody knew.”
Skinner, who expected to be back in the barn on his family’s North Perth dairy farm within days – after a weekend at the cottage – said he felt he built a solid foundation in the riding during this campaign.
“We did a great job – working hard, knocking on doors and now everybody knows who Stewart Skinner is and we’ll see what happens a few years down the road,” he said.
“Mind you, it’s nice having a majority mandate for the party. We can have a little more planning, a little more stability in our lives – so it will be good.”
NDP candidate Romayne Smith Fullerton finished third in the riding, improving her party’s vote share from just under 16% in 2011 to nearly 19% this time around. Smith Fullerton received 7,768 votes, up from the 5,836 garnered by Ellen Papenburg in the last election.
In a June 13 telephone interview from Winnipeg, where she was attending an investigative journalism conference, Smith Fullerton, said “I was so pleased we managed to increase our percentage by such a significant amount.”
She added she found the support she received at debates and doorways “heartening and humbling.
“We ran the campaign that we wanted to run. I had an opportunity to talk about the things in our riding that I didn’t think other people were talking about,” she said, adding, “We got great media coverage for those issues.”
While turning her focus back to her role as a professor of journalism at Western University, Smith Fullerton said she plans to remain engaged politically.
“I’ll figure out some community aspect that I want to be involved in. I need to find a way to continue to help and advocate for people in our riding who need advocacy,” she stated.
Green Party candidate Chris Desjardins more than doubled his own vote total from the last election, picking up 2,000 votes and a 4.9% share, compared to 918 votes and 2.48% in 2011.
In the rest of the crowded field in Perth-Wellington, Family Coalition Party candidate Irma DeVries gathered 789 votes for a 1.9% share, Libertarian Scott Marshall received 411 votes (1%), independent candidate Matthew Murphy 343 (0.8%) and Freedom Party candidate Robby Smink 198 (0.5%).
