Raquel Dancho holds on to Kildonan-St. Paul seat for Conservatives after tight race with Liberals

Kildonan-St. Paul will be held by incumbent Conservative candidate Raquel Dancho, in a race that stretched out into the day after the election, as final votes were counted in the Winnipeg-area riding.

With all 208 polls reporting by about 3 p.m. CT Tuesday afternoon, Dancho came out ahead of Liberal challenger Thomas Naaykens by 1,548 votes, her third victory in the riding where she was first elected in 2019.

Kildonan-St. Paul has voted Conservative six times during the past seven elections.

Naaykens, who studied accounting and served in the Canadian military as an armour officer, was one of several political novices who won a Liberal Party nomination by acclamation this past winter, when the polls suggested the Liberals faced electoral disaster under then-leader Justin Trudeau.

On Monday night, Dancho said she was "really honoured" to be re-elected during what she called a "critical time" for Canada.

"It really speaks to the hard work that we do in the community and really representing everyone with dignity, compassion and respect," she said.

"For me personally, I never take the voter for granted. So we didn't leave anything on the bench — we worked extremely hard."

Kildonan-St. Paul was among a number of ridings across Canada where results were too close to call on election night, as ballots continued to be counted into Tuesday afternoon — including ridings that would decide whether Prime Minister Mark Carney's re-elected Liberals would form a majority or minority government.

On Tuesday afternoon, CBC News projected the Liberals will form a minority government.

Dancho said the race was clearly a "change election, in many ways," and she thinks the fact the Liberals were held to a minority government "speaks volumes to where the electorate is at."

The election comes after new boundaries were drawn for ridings, including Kildonan-St. Paul, where the changes appear to have worked in favour of the Conservatives.

Since the 2021 election, the riding has been extended to the east and now encompasses Conservative-leaning polling areas in the rural municipality of Springfield, including the Winnipeg bedroom community Oakbank.

Dancho said pushing for government fiscal responsibility and cutting taxes, and focusing on affordability and public safety, will be among her top priorities when she returns to Ottawa.

"There was a lot of people hoping for change in this country, because they need the economic growth in this country — they want to be able to afford a home, to be able to afford to have a family. These are real issues that are facing Canada," Dancho said.

"So our expectations of the Liberal minority government is that they're delivering something real for change in this country — and if they're not, we will be holding them accountable on behalf of Canadians."

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew congratulated Carney and his party on their election victory in a social media post on Tuesday, saying he looks forward to "building up this country" with Carney's federal government.

Kildonan-St. Paul was the last of the 14 ridings in Manitoba to be called, with the Conservatives coming out of the election with seven seats — the same number the party went in with.

The Liberals improved from four Manitoba seats to six, and the NDP dwindled from three seats to just one, their worst showing in the province since 1993.

The Conservative seats are concentrated largely in rural Manitoba, while the Liberals' seats are in Winnipeg and northern Manitoba. The province's lone NDP seat is in the inner-city Winnipeg Centre riding.