How Jamil Jivani managed to score a 20-year record win in Durham | Maqvi News

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OTTAWA — Conservatives say they’re “thrilled” by the extent of Jamil Jivani’s win in Durham, and claim they achieved it by taking votes from traditionally Liberal and NDP pockets of the riding with a hyper-focused message on carbon taxes, housing and affordability.

Jivani, a lawyer and former broadcaster, won Monday’s byelection in Durham with a resounding 57.4 per cent of the vote, leaving the Liberals and the NDP in the dust with 22.5 per cent and 10.4 per cent of the vote respectively. The People’s Party of Canada, for their part, got 4.4 per cent of the votes.

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Jivani’s score is two points higher than the 55 per cent score held by former minister Bev Oda in 2011 when Prime Minister Stephen Harper formed a majority government, and 11 points more than former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s reelection result in 2021 when he was at the helm of the party.

Durham has been a Conservative stronghold for the past 20 years. But the Liberals had managed to stay at or above the 30 per cent mark in the past three elections whereas the NDP was at 16 or 18 per cent.

A senior Conservative source, speaking on background to be able to talk more freely about internal numbers, said the party did “remarkably well” in areas where the Conservatives traditionally hadn’t performed in the past. In total, the source claims that the party won all but three polling stations.

Areas where the Conservatives made inroads include North Oshawa — part of former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent’s old turf — and Bowmanville — traditionally Liberal or NDP supporters, they added.

In an area where O’Toole is a household name, with Erin O’Toole having been MP for more than a decade and leader of the federal Conservatives and his father John O’Toole, the local MPP for nearly two decades, bringing in a new candidate, 36-year-old Jivani, was a risk but it ended up paying off.

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“We were not sure how that would play, but we’re thrilled,” said the source.

Pollster and CEO of Abacus Data David Coletto said the results in Durham reflect the boost seen in Conservative support over the last few months, and other parties should pay attention.

“If there was any doubt among Liberals that the national polls that Abacus or others are putting out are not reflective of reality, I think this should be a wake-up call to them,” he said.

Coletto also noted the NDP’s “disappointing” result in a riding that has many unionized workers. He said the drop in support might reflect the lack of motivation of their voters due to the supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals that intends to keep them in power until June 2025.

Conservatives’ efforts to continue representing O’Toole’s former riding have been long in the making.

Jivani announced last April that he would be seeking the nomination in Durham and was confirmed as candidate in August. He had been campaigning ever since. The Liberals, on the other hand, announced in January that Robert Rock, a councilor for the township of Scugog, would be their candidate.

Rock, it turns out, was hoping to run for the Conservatives just last year. He has since publicly said that he does not support the current version of the party under leader Pierre Poilievre.

“Robert Rock reached out to me in the summer, looking around for the Conservative nomination. He claimed at the time to be very excited about Pierre’s message; he claimed to be very excited about where the party was going,” said Ben Smith, president of Altitude Public Affairs and campaign strategist.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the hostilities against Jivani back in January after calling the candidate a “twofer” for being an “ideologue” and an “insider.” In the weeks that followed, Liberal ministers and MPs touted Rock as the “local guy” as they paraded in the riding.

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It was a similar strategy to the one used in last year’s byelection in Oxford against Conservative candidate Arpan Khanna which saw the Liberals finish second but get a boost in the polls.

Smith said the Liberals ran a “very nasty campaign” against Jivani and that voters aren’t buying it anymore. “It was very white-focused, Gen-X focused. It made people who don’t look like Justin Trudeau and Robert Rock feel like outsiders, and I just think people are over that,” he said.

Smith said that Jivani and the party are hyper focused on the issues that people care about right now, which is making life more affordable by axing the carbon tax, getting homes built and restoring the dream of homeownership, as well as stopping repeat offenders from going back on the streets.

“While the Liberals like to attack and while the Liberals like to lecture… I think Jamil ran a really positive campaign focused on solutions,” he added.

Former senior Liberal staffer Zita Astravas, who is now vice-president federal at Wellington Advocacy, said it was a “tough campaign” for the Liberals from the very start, as they haven’t held that seat in 20 years, but said Rock was an “excellent candidate” who was running a “positive campaign.”

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She also noted that it is normal for cabinet ministers to lend a helping hand to local candidates in byelections, especially as they get closer to a general election.

“Cabinet ministers or other parliamentarians going in canvassing in that community is an opportunity for them to continue to door-knock across the country as the Liberal Party is getting their campaign machine ready for whenever the next election may be. And it’s important to keep that going.”

The Conservative source pushed back: “If you didn’t have expectations to win, you do not put that amount of effort in. That’s a lot of resources and a lot of money when ministers come in from outside of the province. It’s not like Mélanie Joly or Seamus O’Regan were stopping in on their drive from Toronto to Ottawa.”

Jason Lietaer, president at Enterprise Canada, said that while Conservatives did what they “needed to do” in Durham, he warned them about being too overconfident over their win.

“The next federal election is unlikely to be until September of 2025. And that’s a long time to sort of keep up the momentum and keep everyone interested,” he said. “So, you need some of these milestone wins over the course of the time, and I think this is a really important one.”

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Astravas said that Trudeau is a strong campaigner and has been behind in the polls but managed to form a government come election time. But Lietaer said things are “different this time”.

“People are differently tired of Mr. Trudeau. Both men and women have written him off in different ways. There’s an anger and a palpable sort of anger out there… and at some point, people stop listening to you. And people have at least slowed down or stopped listening to Mr. Trudeau,” he said.

“The Liberals not understanding why people don’t want them anymore is the best news for every Conservative in the country.”

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