Singh won the previous iteration of his riding, Burnaby-South, by a comfortable 4,000 vote margin in the 2021 election, but shifting trends of support and a change in its boundaries that bring new voters into the district make it look like less of a sure bet in 2025.
The apparent collapse of NDP voting intentions early in the campaign make for a possible upset for Singh’s Liberal contender in the riding, social entrepreneur Wade Chang, according to the projections of poll aggregator 338Canada.
Burnaby Central is a rapidly urbanized riding that takes in the city’s major town centres of Metrotown and Edmonds. Besides Chang, Singh faces Conservative candidate James Yan, whose party was a distant third to the Liberals in the 2021 election, and Richard Farbridge who is carrying the banner for the People’s Party of Canada, which was a minor factor in the last three elections.
Burnaby, however, is headquarters to unions that have been some of the NDP’s strongest supporters. Former NDP MP and SFU political scientist Kennedy Stewart said their organizational expertise to get the vote out can’t be discounted.
Polling trends and surging support for Carney opened the doors for local candidate Jake Sawatzky, a recent University of B.C. grad, early on. It’s difficult to say if that can sway the political machine of the NDP’s Peter Julian, who has been the incumbent here for more than 20 years.
Julian won the riding by more than 13,000 votes in the last election, by 12,000 in 2019 and an apparent firming of NDP support in Metro Vancouver with 21 per cent voting intentions versus 14 per cent provincially, according to Angus Reid Institute polling, makes him look like the best bet among the three ridings to remain in the NDP caucus.
The redrawn New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville gives up some of the Burnaby blocks it had in exchange for the historically distinct Maillardville neighbourhood of Coquitlam. There are five candidates with the possibility of a split in the Conservative vote between the party’s nominated candidate Indy Panchi and Lourence Singh, who was disqualified from the nomination but is now running as an independent.
