Liberals lose closely contested seat to Bloc Québécois after vote validation

The Liberals have dropped one seat after Elections Canada’s validation process determined they lost a tightly contested Quebec riding.

Terrebonne, just north of Montreal, was one of the last ridings to be called on Tuesday afternoon. The final vote count had the Liberals flip the seat from the Bloc Québécois by 35 votes.

But CBC News has learned that after Elections Canada double-checked the numbers during its validation process, the Bloc in fact held the riding by a margin of 44 votes.

The flip pulls the Liberals — who fell just a few seats short of a majority government — down to 168 seats and the Bloc jumps to 23 seats.

The validation process — which is different from an official recount — is a way for Elections Canada to verify the unofficial results that are reported on election night. Each local returning officer goes through the results reported by each polling station to weed out any potential errors.

“When you’re talking about hundreds of or thousands of polling locations and lots of results coming in, errors can happen. Whether it’s something gets misheard on the phone or somebody accidentally types in the wrong number on the keyboard,” Matthew McKenna, a spokesperson for Elections Canada, told CBC News before election day.

“The returning officer for each riding goes through the statements of the vote from every poll and makes sure that that’s checked against the records so that we can adjust for any little errors or mistakes.”

Even after the validation process, the race was so close that it will trigger an official recount. Such a recount is overseen by a judge and is automatically triggered if a candidate wins by less than 0.1 per cent of the overall vote.

Official recounts have flipped ridings in the past. In 2021, the Bloc candidate was declared the winner of the then-named riding of Châteauguay-Lacolle. But an official recount two weeks later gave the victory to the Liberals.

An official recount will also be triggered in the N.L. riding of Terra Nova-The Peninsulas, where the Liberal candidate edged out the Conservative by 12 votes.