Montreal’s federal riding map remained pretty red in the end after all.
With the Liberals garnering 70.7 percent of votes cast in the city, the Bloc Québécois taking 26.8 percent and the Conservatives 18.6 percent, Montrealers sent 17 Liberals and one New Democrat to parliament.
Mount Royal was the riding where most Jewish eyes were cast Monday night—given how around 28,000 community members make up more than a quarter of its population.
But despite anger by Jewish Montrealers over Ottawa’s perceived shift away from support for Israel and seeming indifference to the explosion of antisemitism in Canada since October 2023, the Conservatives could not dislodge the riding from the Liberal side of the ledger. Anthony Housefather won his fourth term as MP.
Thank you to the people of Mount Royal for once again putting their trust in me. Serving my riding and country is the honour of a lifetime. Je remercie les gens de Mont-Royal de m’avoir encore une fois fait confiance, servir ma circonscription et mon pays est l’honneur d’une vie.
— Anthony Housefather (@AHousefather) April 29, 2025
After the polls closed and ballots began to be counted, Neil Oberman took an early lead—with as much as several hundred votes for the firebrand lawyer running for the Conservatives—but as the tallying moved further eastward in the riding, that lead dissipated and disappeared.
With all but one of 204 polls reporting, 50.9 percent of supporters gave Housefather the nod, beating his main opponent by 5,000 votes. However, with his own showing of 40.7 percent—or 19,961 ballots among voter turnout around 64 percent—Oberman more than doubled the Tories’ previous showing, exceeding a generation of fortunes in Mount Royal.
Oberman back to his law practice
Having slept two hours the night before, Oberman was back in his office on Tuesday morning, from where voiced great praise for his volunteers and supporters, while also wishing for a higher turnout.
“We respect the outcome because the people have spoken,” he told The CJN. “This election was not a referendum on one person, but on the Liberal Party, its policies and its politics. We conducted this campaign professionally and it was our right and our duty to question that party’s positions.”
(The three other candidates in the race representing the New Democrats, Marxist-Leninist and Bloc Québécois, could only eke out a combined 8.3 percent of the vote.)
The result from the 45th federal election vindicated Housefather’s decision to stay with the Liberals, after publicly announcing his outrage over the party’s near-unanimous support for the March 2024 NDP motion calling for a pathway to Palestine statehood and a ban on new permits for arms exports to Israel among other things, which was denounced by him and the Conservatives as rewarding terrorism.
Housefather did not reply to The CJN’s queries for comment on Tuesday morning.
Oberman, who became a prominent legal defender of Montreal students citing anti-Israel and antisemitic intimidation on campuses, tapped into a sense of anger among area Jews feeling betrayed by the Liberals, while speaking extensively about lost housing and employment opportunities for youth. While the outcome was clearly not what not he anticipated, the first-time candidate says “a message has been sent. That Jews will no longer accept to be marginalized, and those who do try to marginalize us will pay a price. We will demand better treatment.
“We invested and built in this country, we bled, and we sweat for it, and will hold onto it and continue to work hard to make sure that everyone in this riding continues to live safely and live as Jews and participate fully in Canadian life.”
Asked if he would continue to be involved in electoral politics, Oberman told The CJN “It’s up the people of Mount Royal, but for now I have to keep working.” As for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who lost his own seat of 21 years, Oberman said “He is a great man who stood by the Jewish community when everyone else chose to stand across the street. Even when it was not politically expedient, he did so at great personal cost.
“People are remembered not by how many votes they get, but by the principles and issues they stand for.” Oberman adds that Poilievre “will be judged for what he did, and not what he didn’t do.”
Results from other relevant ridings
Across town in the west island riding of Pierrefonds-Dollard, home to some 9,000 Jews—and the site of a synagogue and Jewish community centre that were twice firebombed since October 2023—Conservative challenger Tanya Toledano was unable to unseat Liberal incumbent Sameer Zuberi, who comfortably won his third mandate with 59.7 percent of votes.
Zuberi is one of more than two dozen Liberals who endorsed the so-called ‘Palestine platform’ which among other things, pledged to endorse the concept of anti-Palestinian racism, and to impose an arms and security embargo on Israel. He has had a difficult relationship with Montreal’s Jewish community, having been identified closely with the anti-Netanyahu Concordia riots of 2002, and harshly criticized by many Montreal Jews for his enthusiastic salute and support of his keffiyeh-clad NDP colleagues when he supported their March 2024 Israel-Gaza motion.
But like Neil Oberman in Mount Royal, popular city councillor Toledano boosted Conservative fortunes—in this case by a whopping 80 percent to 18,451 votes—but still far short of what she needed to make it to the finish line with only 31.1 percent of votes. The NDP candidate placed a distant third with only 5.3 percent of votes, reflecting the trend of the national collapse of New Democrats.
Outremont voters returned two-term incumbent Rachel Bendayan with 55 percent of votes, compared to her Conservative rival Ronan Reich’s 12.6 percent. Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault came in a distant fifth, with only 9.7 percent of ballots cast. With one of 171 polls left to tally, the NDP’s Eve Péclet, running in what was former NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s riding, managed a distant fourth place showing with only 10.6 percent.
THANK YOU! Your support, your energy, and your encouragement made all the difference. Together, we ran a campaign we can all be proud of!
— Rachel Bendayan (@RachelBendayan) April 29, 2025
Bendayan was named languages minister and associate minister of public safety in December 2024, during the final days of the Trudeau administration. It was long enough to announce an antisemitism summit—and then she was renamed to Mark Carney’s cabinet as Immigration minister after the leadership swap.
With all but one poll reporting, NDG-Westmount sent Anna Gainey back to parliament with a commanding 63.7 percent of the vote, more than 32,900 voters giving her a second mandate since her 2023 byelection win following the resignation of Marc Garneau. Conservative challenger Neil Drabkin, who served as an advisor to former multiculturalism minister Gerry Weiner and chief of staff to former energy minister Joe Oliver, more than tripled the party’s fortunes in NDG-Westmount with 10,262 votes. The NDP was kept to 7 percent of the vote.
NDG-Westmount is also considered a safe Liberal seat, and voters turned out en masse for backbencher Gainey, a former party president and government policy advisor who has been widely viewed as a barely visible campaigner—she was absent from many events, debates or town halls, and generally avoiding appearances or confrontations with other candidates.
In the riding of Saint-Laurent, home to about 5,000, Jews including many in Montreal’s Sephardi community—and with a Muslim population of more than 20 percent—Liberal MP Emanuella Lambropoulos secured her fourth mandate with 59.1 percent of the vote, a similar result to her 2021 win, while Conservative challenger Richard Serour, an immigration consultant and former radio host, boosted his share of the vote to 28 percent.
A backbencher occasionally heard in the House, Lambropoulos was lambasted by many Montreal Jews for her seemingly one-sided condemnation of Israel for the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict and claimed ignorance of the waves of antisemitic intimidation and violence that took place in Montreal at the time, which included groups on social media openly calling for harassment of Israeli Montrealers, and anyone displaying any support for Israel in Jewish neighbourhoods. She has also been roundly derided by Quebec nationalists for her perceived obtuseness on French language issues in Quebec.
Of note, Justin Trudeau’s former riding of Papineau went heavily red with 52.6 percent of votes for Liberal Marjorie Michel, who slightly outpolled her predecessor, while the New Democrats’ Niall Ricardo, a Jewish pro-Palestinian militant who was a familiar face associated with encampments in Montreal, pulled third place with 16.4 percent of votes, the NDP support dropping almost a quarter since the last election.
The riding also saw some minor controversy, when longtime activist and former NDP candidate Christine Paré, a black woman of Haitian origin who claimed to have signed up the most members, was reportedly shunted aside as a candidate. With the support of a local anti-racism advocacy group, Paré has filed racism and sexism complaints against the NDP with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Despite its general collapse across the country, the NDP managed to save its sole Quebec seat in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, where Alexandre Boulerice won 40.6 percent of the vote, a considerable drop from his 2021 win, but still more than 5,000 votes ahead of his Liberal rival.
Former Liberal ministers Marc Miller, Mélanie Joly and Steve Guilbeault were also returned to parliament with comfortable margins.
With two-thirds of eligible voters casting a ballot, Quebecers sent 43 Liberal, 23 Bloc, 11 Conservative, and one NDP MPs to parliament, the Liberals more than doubling their seat count.
