Rick Perkins celebrating his election win with his campaign team. Photo: Cheyenne Nelson
The Conservatives claimed victory in the riding of South Shore-St. Margarets in the federal election unseating the province’s lone cabinet minister.
Rick Perkins defeated incumbent Bernadette Jordan who had served as Ministers of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard in the last government.
Both Perkins and Jordan agreed that her role in the moderate livelihood fishery dispute played a role in Monday’s election result. “The fishing community on the South Shore felt that they had been let down by the Trudeau government and by their member of parliament quite a bit,” Perkins said.
Jordan feels it impacted some votes but also felt other issues may have impacted her loss, “There’s no question it played some role but this is a very big riding and there are people with very different outlooks on that situation,” Jordan said.
Perkins won the riding with 19,771 votes, while Jordan received 17,793. Olivia Dorey of the NDP had an admirable night despite losing, she earned 9,274. That marks an improvement for the NDP’s in the riding compared to 2019 by close to 1,000 votes despite overall turnout being down by about 4,200 voters.
Rounding out the votes was Green candidate Thomas Trappenberg who received 1,395 votes.
Perkins says he first began to believe he could win the riding following the provincial election just a few weeks earlier, “I kept hearing at the doors people say we’ve sent the Liberals a message provincially and were going to do it federally as well.”
With the election wrapping up Perkins says he’s now focused on gearing up to serve his constituents. Part of that plan will be ensuring he has offices accessible to everyone and he says he plans to open offices in Shelburne, the HRM portion of the riding, and in Bridgewater.
In his victory remarks, Perkins thanked many people that he says were essential to his win offering his thanks to his entire campaign team and all of the volunteers and he credited his wife as his biggest supporter.
