PC Obby Khan holds 20-vote lead over Liberal Willard Reaves in Fort Whyte byelection
CBC
Voters in the Fort Whyte district cast their ballots Tuesday to decide who should fill former Manitoba premier Brian Pallister's seat in the legislature.
At 9:32 p.m., with 44 of 56 polls reporting, Obby Khan of the Progressive Conservatives holds a 20-vote lead over Willard Reaves, 1,404 to 1,384. NDP candidate Trudy Schroeder sits in third with 622 votes.
Although most polls have reported, the number of ballots counted so far represent barely half of the total cast in the byelection.
At 8:24 p.m., shortly after voting closed, Elections Manitoba said 6,525 votes had been cast, including those cast in advance and sent in by mail. The total registered voters for Fort Whyte is 15,741.
Elections Manitoba said the number of votes would go up over the course of the evening.
Elections Manitoba is reporting 2,335 advance ballots were cast and 300 mail-in ballots were returned.
The other two nominated candidates running in the election are Nicolas Geddert (Green Party) and Patrick Allard (Independent).
The suburban seat in southwest Winnipeg has normally been a safe one for the PCs, but support for the governing party has lagged during the pandemic, and Premier Heather Stefanson has not been able to turn that around.
A recent poll found that Stefanson is the least popular provincial leader in the country.
Khan, the Tory candidate in the byelection is a former player with the Canadian Football League's Winnipeg Blue Bombers, opened a chain of restaurants after retiring and is well-known in the business community.
The Manitoba Liberals, who have three of the legislature's 57 seats, are running another former Bomber in Reaves. He started his campaign early and has been knocking on doors consistently.
The New Democrats are running Schroeder, a former director with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and hope their strong polling provincewide can translate into a victory.
The Green party candidate is Geddert, a community organizer and volunteer. Allard, a contractor who has run his own business for 15 years, is running as an Independent.
Map of Fort Whyte district:
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