Lawsuit alleging anti-Black racism in federal public service heads to Federal Court

REGINA – Saskatchewan residents are casting votes in Monday’s provincial election after a four-week campaign that appeared to tighten the gap between the two major political parties.

Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party is seeking a fifth-straight majority after 17 years in office, while Carla Beck’s NDP is looking to take back government for the first time since 2007.

Moe has promised broad tax relief and to continue withholding federal carbon levy payments to Ottawa.

Beck has pledged to spend more to fix health care and education, pause the gas tax, and remove the provincial sales tax on children’s clothes and some grocery items.

Political experts say Moe is favoured to win, given his party’s strength in rural areas. But polls suggest a closer race.

To win a majority in the 61-seat legislature, the NDP would need to sweep the 28 seats in the three largest cities — Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert — and hope for help elsewhere.

At dissolution, the governing Saskatchewan Party had 42 seats, while the Opposition NDP had 14. There were four Independents and one seat was vacant.

Voters are able to cast their ballots at polling stations throughout the province, with counting set to begin after polls close at 8 p.m.

Beck cast her ballot Monday morning in her constituency of Regina Lakeview, along with her husband and three children. She wore a T-shirt that read, “Prairie Living,” and thanked election workers.

Moe and his wife cast their ballots last week at an advanced poll in his hometown of Shellbrook.

Beck told supporters on Sunday in Regina that she’s ready to deliver the change people are asking for.

“It’s time for a government that’s going to work with you, not for themselves,” said Beck, who would be the province’s first woman premier if her party wins.

“It’s time to fix health care here in the birthplace of medicare. It’s time to make life more affordable starting on day one.

“It’s time to invest in our kids, our most important resource, and make sure that they have the education that they need.

“And it’s time to get the economy back on track.”

Moe did not have any public events on the last day of the campaign. But in Saskatoon on Saturday, he said incumbent governments have had it tough and his party is seeing similar challenges.

“That being said, we have 61 of the finest candidates that I certainly have met,” he told reporters.

Blaine Higgs’ New Brunswick Progressive Conservatives were defeated last week to Susan Holt’s Liberals. Higgs, who lost his own seat, was in power for six years.

Moe said he plans to create a brighter future for everyone.

“What we are focused on is forming a majority government,” he said.

Saskatchewan’s campaign largely focused on health care, affordability and crime, though Moe raised the issue of school change rooms later in the race.

Moe said his first order of business if re-elected would be to ban “biological boys” from using school changing rooms with “biological girls.”

He made the promise after learning of a complaint at a southeast Saskatchewan school about two biological boys using a girls change room. The pledge was not previously included in his party’s platform document.

It was later revealed that a parent of the two children who were the subjects of the complaint is an NDP candidate. Moe said he didn’t know that when he made the promise.

Beck has said such a ban would make vulnerable kids more vulnerable. She also promised to repeal a Saskatchewan Party law that requires parental consent if children under 16 want to change their names or pronouns at school.

Beck said voters want the next government to deal with more pressing issues, including classroom sizes, fixing health care and being able to afford gas and groceries.

She said her promises would cost an additional $3.5 billion over four years, with plans to cut what she calls Saskatchewan Party waste and to balance the budget by the end of her term.

Moe’s platform would cost an additional $1.2 billion over four years. He said his tax reduction plan would save a family of four $3,400 over four years. It also includes tax credits for those looking to grow their families or put their children in sports and arts.

Moe promised deficits in the first two years, followed by a surplus in 2027.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

VICTORIA – An ongoing count of absentee ballots in British Columbia’s election has seen the NDP cut the B.C. Conservatives’ lead in a key riding to just nine votes.

If the NDP wins Surrey-Guildford and holds onto other leads, it will be elected or leading in 47 seats, which is the threshold for a majority in the legislature.

Monday’s count of more than 22,000 absentee and special ballots provincewide could finally produce a winner in the election, nine days after the Oct. 19 vote.

Recounts and a tally of mail-in votes failed to settle the contest on the weekend, with neither Premier David Eby’s New Democrats nor John Rustad’s B.C. Conservatives emerging on Sunday with a majority.

But the mail-in count increased the prospects for an NDP government when the Conservative lead in Surrey-Guildford was cut sharply.

All eyes have been on that Metro Vancouver seat since counting resumed at 9 a.m., with 226 absentee votes to count, and results are being update hourly on the Elections BC website.

In the first hour of counting, the Conservative lead in Surrey-Guildford was cut from 12 to 9 votes.

The party went into the weekend’s count of mail-in and assisted telephone votes with a lead of 103.

The current standings have the NDP leading or elected in 46 ridings, with the B.C. Conservatives leading or elected in 45 and the Greens with two elected members.

While the makeup of the legislature is expected to become clear on Monday, judicial recounts could still take place after that if the margin in a riding is less than 1/500th of all votes cast.

In Surrey-Guildford, where an estimated 19,306 were cast, the margin for a judicial recount is about 38 votes or fewer.

A full hand recount on Sunday in Surrey City Centre resulted in the NDP lead there being reduced by three votes, to 175, while a partial recount in Kelowna Centre saw the Conservative lead cut by four votes, to 68.

That has been a further cut to 63 in the absentee count.

The result of a full recount in Juan de Fuca-Malahat, where the NDP lead by 113 votes, is also to be announced Monday.

Aisha Estey, president of the B.C. Conservative Party, said she spent the weekend in a warehouse watching the counting of mail-in ballots.

In a post on social media, she said: “Elections BC staff have been working tirelessly and doing their best within the confines of the legislation that governs their work.”

“Would we have liked mail-ins to be counted closer to (election day)? Sure,” she added. “But I saw nothing that caused me concern.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

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MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — Voters in the small South American nation of Uruguay cast ballots Sunday in a presidential election in which a center-left rural mayor pulled ahead of the conservative incumbent-party candidate and pushed the race into a second round of voting.

Both of the leading candidates — a two-time mayor and former history teacher, Yamandú Orsi, and the center-right ruling party’s candidate, Álvaro Delgado — told crowds of supporters late Sunday that they expected to face each other in a runoff on Nov. 24, reflecting official election results with over 80% of votes counted.

The outcome came as little surprise. But the civility of the presidential race was striking, the contest between moderates defying trends of bitter division and democratic erosion seen across the region and further north in the United States.

Orsi, representing Uruguay’s center-left Broad Front alliance that held the presidency in Uruguay from 2005-2019, went into the election as the front-runner, reflecting a desire for a stronger social safety net in one of Latin America’s most expensive countries, where one in five children lives in poverty and an aging population has clamored for higher pensions.

“We are going in for these 27 days,” Orsi told thousands of energized supporters in Montevideo, referring to his final campaign push ahead of the run-off set for Nov. 24. “The Broad Front is once again the most voted party in Uruguay.”

Delgado — the former chief of staff of President Luis Lacalle Pou who trained as a veterinarian — campaigned on pledges to continue the policies of Lacalle Pou, who has a 50% approval rating. The constitution bars the current president from running for a second consecutive term.

“People placed their trust in us,” he told a massive gathering of his supporters shortly after midnight. “Tomorrow we will be meeting to plan the campaign for the runoff.”

Delgado was joined onstage by the election’s most dynamic candidate, Andrés Ojeda, 40, who placed in a distant third but secured a surprisingly strong showing for a muscular, media-savvy lawyer with a penchant for adopting dogs and discussing star signs.

He sought to energize apathetic young voters with splashy campaign videos showing him lifting weights in tight undershirts at the gym.

“The government cannot be won without us,” Ojeda said at an election night event alongside Delgado.

Exit polls by four prominent polling agencies showed Orsi leading his rival with 42%-44% of the vote, falling short of the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff on Nov. 24, reflecting voter apathy in the civilized presidential race between rivals whose priorities overlap.

The polls showed Delgado clinching 27-28% of the vote.

Electoral officials reported a turnout of 89% of 2.7 million eligible voters in Uruguay, widely considered a model democracy and bastion of stability where voting in presidential and congressional contests is compulsory.

The electoral contest has largely focused on the rise in homicides and robberies, with the governing coalition advocating a tough-on-crime approach and the liberal coalition seeking to increase the state’s role in security matters.

Over its 15 years in power, the Broad Front presided over robust economic growth and socially liberal laws that raised the tiny country’s global profile with the pioneering legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana for recreational use. Uruguay has also developed one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98% renewable energy.

With Orsi’s working-class roots, casual wear and promise to eschew many of the benefits enjoyed by heads of state, voters appeared to endorse a candidate with the same folksy appeal as former President José “Pepe” Mujica.

The eccentric former guerrilla and present-day chrysanthemum farmer helped spearhead Uruguay’s transformation into the continent’s most socially liberal country during his 2010-2015 presidency.

Now 89, Mujica is battling esophageal cancer, but he still managed to cast his ballot in Montevideo on Sunday. Arriving to vote in a wheelchair, he was quickly swarmed by reporters.

“We need to support democracy, not because it is perfect, but because humans have not yet invented anything better,” he told journalists.

The presidential campaigns have played out in Uruguay without the vitriolic insults and personal attacks seen next door in economically dysfunctional Argentina or in politically polarized Brazil.

“In a way, Uruguay has been boring, but boring in this sense is very good,” said Juan Cruz Díaz, a political analyst who runs the Cefeidas consultancy group in Buenos Aires. “We’ve seen so many dramatic changes in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and suddenly we face elections in Uruguay in which there is a general consensus, there’s stability.”

More divisive than the race itself was a constitutional referendum that would have overhauled Uruguay’s social security system by lowering the retirement age, boosting minimum payouts and transferring Uruguayans’ privately managed savings to a government-run trust.

Exit polls indicated that voters rejected the radical $23 billion proposal, which would have expanded the fiscal deficit and spooked markets.

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DeBre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina