Two Ottawa-area incumbents ousted in Ontario election

A pair of Ottawa-area incumbent MPPs were defeated in the Ontario election Thursday.

Jeremy Roberts, who was first elected in 2018 as a Progressive Conservative in Ottawa West—Nepean, lost his seat despite his party winning a second majority mandate.

The NDP’s Chandra Pasma, who narrowly lost to Roberts in 2018, eked out a victory this time around, winning by 908 votes. She won 37 per cent of the vote compared to Roberts’s 34.9.

"What I've heard from people is they felt like the last four years the government and the local MPP didn't have their back," Pasma told CTV News. "Now they're going to have somebody who fights for them realy hard every day."

Roberts gave a speech to supporters congratulating Pasma, but declined an interview.

In Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, east of Ottawa, Liberal Amanda Simard was unseated.

She won the riding for the Progressive Conservatives in 2018, but left the party over cuts to francophone education months afterwards. She later joined the Liberals in 2020.

PC candidate Stéphane Sarrazin beat Simard by nearly 1,500 votes.

"Try to do something about the cost of living, invest in infrastructure, work for hte workers. Those are all the priorities - that's what people want," Sarrazin said.

Simard said she worked hard to move projects in the riding forward during her four-year term.

"There's still a lot of work to do in politics," she said. "I think we need to stop being divided, and we need to be working together in the next few months and the next few years."

Doug Ford’s PCs won a majority government, with the NDP set to again form the official opposition. NDP leader Andrea Horwath and Liberal leader Steven Del Duca both resigned their positions, with Del Duca failing to win his own seat.

For a recap of CTV News Ottawa’s live coverage of election results, go here. For an interactive map of the results in all 124 Ontario ridings, go here.

- with files from Stefan Keyes and Natalie van Rooy, CTV News Ottawa