New Brunswick Byelections
Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore, Dieppe, Restigouche-Chaleur byelections and a Polling Canada programing note.
Overview
On Monday, April 24th, we’re being treated to not one but three byelections in the province of New Brunswick. The ridings of Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore, Dieppe, and Restigouche-Chaleur are all up for grabs so let’s take a brief look at each.
At the end of the article you can also find a programming note related to the recent Twitter change for Polling Canada.
Restigouche-Chaleur
Restigouche-Chaleur should be a pretty boring seat to watch come election night. Like all three of the byelections, this seat was made vacant by an incumbent Liberal MLA.
Restigouche-Chaleur, in one shape or another, has been a Liberal seat since the 1970’s, with its most recent Liberal MLA being Daniel Guitard. Guitard retired his seat in the legislature to run for mayor of Belle-Baie which he would go on to win.
During the last provincial election, Guitard won 55.7% of the vote in Restigouche-Chaleur, with the Green’s coming second with 27.6%. The PC’s pulled only 16.7% of the 6,868 votes cast during the last election.
This riding could be interesting to watch strictly to see how the Green’s fare. The last election saw them garner 27.6% but that built upon on the 12.4% they captured the election prior. Whether this will translate into a similar, if not a better performance, will have to be seen.
Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore
Staying in the north of the province, and just as in Restigouche-Chaleur before it, Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore was vacated by a former Liberal MLA; Denis Landry. Landry resigned his seat to run for mayor of Hautes-Terres and would end up winning by acclamation in 2022.
In the previous election, the Liberals pulled 63.8% while the PC’s and the Greens followed up with 24% and 12.2% of the 6,556 votes cast, respectively. This seat, if previous voting trends remain the same, will be the safest of the three seats for the Liberals come Monday night.
The fact that this riding is as safe as it is likely led to the decision to run the new Liberal leader, Susan Holt, in this byelection. It’s safe to say that the Liberals will be able to count their new leader among their legislative ranks after Monday night.
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Dieppe
Finally, we head further south in the province to the riding of Dieppe. Dieppe was vacated by former Liberal MLA, Roger Melanson. Melanson, the former Liberal interim leader after Kevin Vickers resigned in 2020, announced he would be leaving provincial politics in 2022.
In the previous election the Liberals won Dieppe with 60.2% of the vote. The PC’s, Greens and New Democrats each pulled 22.2%, 15.1% and 2.6% of the vote respectively. There were 7,586 votes cast in the last election here.
While there shouldn’t be any surprised in Dieppe come election night, this’ll be another riding to see how the Greens fare. Despite pulling 15.1% of the vote in 2020, this was up nearly 10% since the last time a Green candidate ran in the riding in 2014 (2018 didn’t see a Green run here).
Fun tidbit, three of the four candidates running have last names starting with L! (Losier, Leonard, Landry)
Shifting Gears: Where’d The Twitter Comments Go?
As avid users of Twitter will already know, the comments on Polling Canada posts have been restricted going forward, at least for the foreseeable future.
As many of you already know, I do this on my own free time and without being paid to run Polling Canada. Doing all of this started as a hobby for me in 2017 and eventually morphed into the concept of aggregating public polling information, as well as important election information, and package it neatly into one location.
For the last few months I’ve been musing over the idea of restricting Twitter replies on PC posts. While comments on my posts have never been fully bonita, they have traditionally been tame and manageable. However, as I’m sure many Twitter users are already aware, a series of changes on the site in the last few of months have severely degraded the quality of the site. Couple this with a further increase in the following base for Polling Canada and it spells a bit of a viewing disaster in the replies.
Replies on Polling Canada posts over the last little while have steadily declined in value and in content and increased in hostility and disrespect for everyone involved. I want to be able to enjoy the work that I do on Twitter for you all and part of that means restricting such comments going forward.
Because there is no way to make the browsing experience enjoyable in the reply section, both for myself as someone who has to manage the account and for you as a user and reader, I’ve elected to limit replies for the foreseeable future on Twitter. Users are still able to use the quote-retweet function and I encourage people to use it.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, Twitter will improve in the future and the community around it. Until then, I’ll do what I can to keep things civil.
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