Liberals up one in Quebec, and Dosanjh is back in

Good news for the Liberal Party on the election recount front today on both ends of the country.

We've gained one seat in Quebec that was originally in the Bloc column, with a judicial recount today awarding the suburban Montreal riding of Brossard-La Prairie to the Liberals:

Liberal candidate Alexandra Mendes has unseated Bloc Québécois incumbent Marcel Lussier in the riding of Brossard- La Prairie, according to a recount conducted by a Quebec Superior Court judge.

Mendes defeated Lussier by 69 votes, boosting the Liberals' national seat count to 77 and dropping the Bloc's to 49.

Lussier, an engineer and environmental specialist who has held the riding since 2006, originally thought he had won the riding by 102 votes in the Oct. 14 election.

And on the left coast, although a judicial recount lowered his margin of victory to a bare 22 votes, Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh has been upheld as the winner in Vancouver South.

Ujjal Dosanjh, the federal Liberal incumbent, said Friday he was humbled by a recount victory in his Vancouver South riding that gave him a win by only 22 votes instead of the 33-vote margin on election night.

We're not out of the woods yet in BC. Liberal Keith Martin in Esquimalt-Juan De Fuca is facing a judicial recount on Monday. Election night numbers gave him a 68-vote margin over Conservative Troy De Souza.

In other recounts still outstanding, Kitchener-Waterloo (where the Conservatives upset Liberal Andrew Telegdi) will go Wednesday, and a recont in Brampton-West, which Liberal Andrew Kania took by 223 votes, has yet to be scheduled. Earlier, a Conservative victory was upheld in PEI.

I've got my fingers crossed for Keith Martin, but very relieved for Ujjal Dosanjh. He's a good man, and we'll need his experience and his energy for the rebuilding exercise facing the Liberal Party in British Columbia and across Canada.

And the tightness of his race should be a wake-up call. This was thought by most to be one of the safer Liberal ridings in the province. That it was so close -- 22 votes! -- underscores the rebuilding job we face as a party, and the challenge ahead of us. It also underscores the inroads the Conservative Party has made with its strategy to woo ethnic voters, a strategy the Liberals have yet to effectivly counter.

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Harper gets it wrong, again

Apologies for the blogging hiatus of late. I’ve just been swamped at the place they pay me to write, and I’m also concerned that blogging might cause heart attacks.

I did want to briefly pop my head up though to address these comments from Deceivin’ Stephen:

"I know the Liberal party wants to go back to what they consider the good old days, the good old days where backlogs just kept getting longer, where one needed special access to government members, where, frankly, they gave priority to strippers in terms of immigration policy," said Harper, referring to a 2004 controversy over former Liberal immigration minister Judy Sgro's decision to award a visa to a Romanian exotic dancer.

Little problem there Steve. The backlog has actually gotten much larger under the Conservative watch, because you’re not appointing enough adjudicators. Must be having trouble finding enough Conservative partisans to fill the roles.

Canada's backlog of refugee claims is soaring to record numbers due to the government's failure to appoint sufficient adjudicators, says the chairman of the Immigration and Refugee Board.

The backlog has ballooned along with the number of board vacancies since Prime Minister Stephen Harper took office in February 2006.

…In its recent report to Parliament, the board projects that the number of pending claims will soar to 62,300 this year. That's more than triple the line-up when Harper took office and well beyond the previous record of 52,325 pending claims in 2002.

…The board was taking an average of 11.7 months to process a refugee claim when the Harper government took office. But Goodman says the processing time is "significantly affected'' by the lack of adjudicators and is now approaching 16.5 months.

So if it was the good old days under the Liberals, backlog wise, then it must be double happy days now. And on the stripper issue, as I showed about a year ago that dog just won’t hunt.

Oh, and I agree with Telegdi. It’s a horrible bill, and I wouldn’t vote for it either. As for a party that agrees it’s horrible and votes for it in first reading anyway, pledging to fix it in committee? Sounds like a nice plan. But I agree with Dan. I’d say those words could come back to haunt them, but I’m kind of numb to it by now.

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