Northwestern Ontario incumbents hold onto seats in 2025 provincial election

Current projections are showing Northwestern Ontario's four provincial ridings will be represented by some familiar faces at Queen's Park.

The Ontario Progressive Conservative party was projected as the provincial government on Thursday. The victory marked the third-straight majority for the PCs.

Northwestern Ontario didn't vote for change, either: voters in all four of the region's ridings we re-elected the incumbents, according to projections.

Lise Vaugeois of the Ontario NDP is the projected winner in Thunder Bay-Superior North. With 81 out of 82 polls reporting, Vaugeois had earned 11,273 votes, which is about 41 per cent of the riding's vote share.

That put her ahead of PC candidate, and Marathon mayor, Rick Dumas, who had about 9,300 votes, and Liberal Brian Hamilton's 5,800.

Vaugeois said her priorities will include highway safety, health care funding, and education.

"We know that our schools are being underfunded," Vaugeois said. "We know that here again in Thunder Bay-Superior North there are kids who can no longer get a bus to school because of cuts."

"The latest statistic was 49 per cent of the students who no longer can get the bus are not coming at all," she said. "That's very, very serious. And those are funding questions. And I will be pushing very, very hard to restore that funding to education."

Vaugeois said the PC government's approach to consulting with First Nations in mining and development has not been healthy.

"First Nations have the right to free prior informed consent," she said. "You gotta have consultation first. But consent is the bottom line."

"There's the free entry system where anybody in the world can make a mining claim over the computer, over the Internet, and that has left the communities with thousands of claims on their territory," Vaugeois said. "The Chiefs of Ontario have asked to to put a moratorium on that."

"The Ford government refused," she said. "That actually is a very nasty strategy to overwhelm those communities."

Rick Dumas, PC candidate and mayor of Marathon, projected second in the riding, with about 2,000 votes less than Vaugeois.

Liberal Brian Hamilton, who's also a member of Thunder Bay City Council, projected in third place, and John Northey of the Green Party finished the night in fourth place in the riding.