It was a close race, but the Canadian Press is projecting that BC Liberal candidate Peter Milobar has been re-elected to a second term as the MLA in Kamloops-North Thompson.
With 107 of 107 polls reporting, he was leading with 7,028 votes (42.32 per cent) to NDP candidate Sadie Hunter’s 6,237 votes (37.55 per cent). Green candidate Thomas Martin was third with 1,657 votes (9.98 per cent) while the Conservative Party’s Dennis Giesbrecht was fourth with 1,561 votes (9.40 per cent).
Independent candidate Brandon Russell came in fifth place with 125 votes, or 0.75 per cent of the total.
It’s not clear how many of the 5,744 mail-in ballots sent to voters in the riding were returned on time but Milobar says he is still confident he will be returning to Victoria when the results are finalized.
“Those votes could change the numbers a little bit but when you start to see the mainstream media, usually they have a lot of algorithms in the back that they are running,” he told NL News. “We knew it would have been a tough slog and we’re glad to see the hard work paid off.”
“The vote split, given the ballot makeup, was pretty much what we were expecting to happen internally in our poll, and it played out that way, and we made sure we threw everything we had at this.”
A former mayor of Kamloops, Milobar was also city councillor and the chair of the Thompson Regional Hospital District prior to making the move to provincial politics.
In the 2017 election, Milobar got 48.32 per cent of the total vote, beating out the NDP’s Barb Nederpel who finished second with 30.35 per cent of the vote, Dan Hines of the Green Party (running in Kamloops-South Thompson) who got 20.58 per cent of the vote and the Communist Party’s Peter Kerek who got 0.75 per cent of the votes.
Mail-in ballots could take as many as three weeks to count, with final election results currently expected to come out on Nov. 16. There were another 8,041 people who voted over the seven days of advanced polls between Oct. 15 to Oct. 21.
“People were thrilled that we were out and it really made us know that we were on the right track,”Milobar added. “That the mood in the community was still wanting to see both Todd and myself back and I’m glad to see the result shaping up the way it is.”
