By Staff

Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock will again be represented by Jamie Schmale Conservative MP who was re-elected in the federal election on Monday evening.

Preliminary results from Elections Canada show Schmale received 49.2 per cent of the vote; Liberal Judi Forbes 25.9 per cent; Barbara Doyle of the NDP 14.7 per cent; Elizabeth Fraser of the Green Party 8.3 per cent and Gene Balfour of the People's Party of Canada received 1.9 per cent.

“It seemed very long at some points but we all held it together” said Schmale following the announcement of his victory at about 10:30 p.m. He spent the evening watching results come in along with other Conservative Party supporters at The Cat and the Fiddle in Lindsay Oct. 21. “We worked hard we pushed hard to the finish line … and because of each and every one of you we kept this riding Conservative blue.”

He also acknowledged the young volunteers on his campaign.

“We had a lot of youth out today and they were hard workers. It’s good to see young blood involved in the Conservative movement” he said calling it “a team effort.”

One of Schmale’s key election priorities was to make life more affordable for the people of this riding with various initiatives such as doing away with carbon pricing reducing income taxes for those earning less than $46700 a year and removing HST from home heating fuel. He also lamented the Liberal government’s sluggish response to the Eastern Ontario Regional Network wireless broadband internet expansion to which they committed $71 million long after other levels of government had already done so.

Schmale is a former radio journalist and was executive assistant to Conservative MP Barry Devolin for 11 years before running in the 2015 federal election.

Nationally the Liberals won a minority government with 157 seats. The Conservatives become the official opposition with 121 seats.