It was no surprise that Sarrazin kept his seat as the blue wave swept across Ontario.
Stéphane Sarrazin is headed back to Queen’s Park for a second term.
Voters in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell opted to send the Progressive Conservative back to Toronto to represent the riding with Premier Doug Ford’s majority government after the polls closed in the Ontario election on Thursday night.
It was no surprise that Sarrazin kept his seat as the blue wave swept across Ontario. He captured more than 51 per cent of the vote and finished with a winning margin of 6,766 votes.
“We need a strong mandate and leadership to project our jobs,” Sarrazin said in a post on the social media site X.
There were seven candidates in the riding. The biggest challenge came from Trevor Stewart, who represented the Liberal party. He had just over 37 per cent of the vote.
Stewart, 25, earned a bachelor’s degree in Conflict Studies and Human Rights at uOttawa and has worked on Parliament Hill as an assistant to Liberal MP Francis Drouin for the last four years.
“I am grateful to the residents of Glengarry-Prescott-Russell who put their faith in me and voted for me. I have been overwhelmed by all the messages of support that I have received from my neighbours and people from across this riding,” said Stewart, who congratulated Sarrazin on his victory.
“I will continue to fight for our vision of a better Ontario, for more family doctors, for a better education system and for more housing. There is too much on the line to give up. Hope is always possible and when the light shines and the sun rises, look to the East.”
In 2022, at just 23, he was elected to Clarence-Rockland’s city council, where he represents the villages of Hammond and Cheney.
Evening Update
Up until 2018, Glengarry-Prescott-Russell was a safe Liberal seat. That year, it flipped to Amanda Simard, who ran as a Progressive Conservative, but she left the caucus and sat as an independent in 2020 after disagreements over some of the French language policies in the party.
Simard ran as a Liberal candidate in the last election and lost by a slim margin to Sarrazin. He finished with only 1,132 more votes than Simard to win the riding.
Sarrazin told the Vision website based in Rockland that the economy and proposed tariffs on Canadian productions by U.S. President Donald Trump were part of the concerns of people in his riding.
He told the website in a question/answer before the election that a Doug Ford government would be best equipped to deal with Trump.
“The Ontario government is placing greater emphasis than ever on infrastructure, with announcements of good school projects and multimillion-dollar investments in several communities in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell,” Sarrazin said in a Google-translated version. “Additionally, we are taking concrete actions to minimize the impact of Trump’s tariffs and support our economic sector.”
Sarrazin, a former mayor of Alfred and Plantagenet and warden of Prescott and Russell United Counties, represents a large riding that’s located largely east of Ottawa.
The Ottawa River is the northern border while it stops at the border to Quebec in the east. The riding consists of the United Counties of Prescott and Russell, and the part of the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry comprised of the Township of North Glengarry. It also includes parts of Ottawa east of Orléans. Clarence-Rockland, Russell, Cumberland, Navan, Embrun, Casselman and Hawkesbury are in the riding.
Sarrazin has served as a parliamentary assistant to the minister of small business and the minister of francophone affairs since March 2024. He is a former small business owner.
In the last campaign, he pushed for the widening of Highway 174.
Stewart was advocating giving residents of Glengarry-Prescott-Russell more access to family doctors.
“Leaked data from the Ministry of Health in Ontario painted a rough picture. Approximately one in three people in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell either don’t have access to a family doctor or are imminently at risk of losing their family doctor,” Stewart told Postmedia.
“We need to take our health seriously, not waste billions on venture projects in Toronto.”
