Liberal Angie Rowell comes up just short in effort to flip Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge

As Canadians headed to the polls on Monday to vote in the federal election, Angie Rowell and her team spent the final day of her campaign “working to get out the vote,” by door knocking and phone calling.

“We were busy. It was all hands on deck,” the Liberal candidate for Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge told The Ridge.

Going into election night, she and her team were hopeful.

“We’ve remained, I would say, cautiously optimistic throughout the whole campaign. And clearly that was warranted. It was a close run.”

Rowell didn’t win, but said she “couldn’t be more proud” of her team. 

“You cannot do it without a team and the dedication and the hours that no one could ever afford to pay for,” she said.

It was a neck-and-neck race between her and Marc Dalton, the Conservative incumbent for Maple Ridge, who won his third term as MP for Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge riding. 

She secured 30,130 votes (45.2 per cent vote share) compared to Dalton’s 31,556 (47.4 per cent), losing by 1,426 votes. 

This is a significant jump for the Liberals in this riding compared to the past two elections.

In 2021, Ahmed Yousef, now a Maple Ridge city councilor, came in third place behind the NDP and Conservatives, with 25 per cent of the vote.  In 2019, Liberal incumbent Dan Ruimy, now mayor of Maple Ridge, lost the riding to Dalton. Ruimy got 29.7 per cent the votes.

Based on these past election results, Rowell said she started her campaign with a 22,000 vote target to secure a win.

“So to end up with 30,000 votes, I would not have anticipated that,” she said.

The campaign

Mark Carney inspired Rowell to run. (She said she’s delighted he is the new Prime Minister, although she wishes it was with a majority, not a minority, government).

“I cannot imagine any other circumstances that I would have entered into this craziness. So, my goal in this was to get him in as PM [prime minister],” she said.

Rowell found out she was the Liberal candidate four days after the election was called. She picked up the phone and started reaching out to family, friends, and community, asking for help.

“We started with nothing. No money, no office, no staff,” she said.

“For the first two weeks, we were at my kitchen table, we didn’t have an office. . . . And trying to figure out, ‘How are we going to do this? How do we find volunteer coordinators? How do we find volunteers?’ Literally, we didn’t know, and we just kept phoning, and we made it happen.”

In her first week, she said she raised about $25,000, and then got access to $10,000 in a riding account. By the end of the campaign, they had over $70,000.

Many of their volunteers were people who “walked in off the street” or reached out, wanting to help.

“And before we knew it, we had a team,” she said. “None of us had not known each other before — a team of strangers came together with a shared vision and just achieved the almost impossible. It’s amazing to me.”

Her volunteers not only worked day jobs, but also put in long hours to contribute to her campaign. People drove in from other communities to help out.

“The grassroots of it — I  wish everybody could experience it —  see how truly grassroots campaigning can be. And I think it’s a wonderful thing, because it means anybody can do it,” Rowell said.

“Everybody’s there volunteering and willingly giving, because they have this shared vision.”

About a week and half to two weeks into her race, the Liberal Party started to notice what they were achieving in Pitt-Meadows-Maple Ridge riding.

“And then they started to support, and as time went on, and they saw our success, they supported more. I mean, they got to the point where they could see this was a real viable opportunity to flip the riding.”

Despite that they didn’t flip the riding, Rowell has immense pride for her volunteers and their accomplishments.

“It’s sad that it gets summed up with ‘we lost,’ which clearly we did,” Rowell said. “[The Conservative candidate] got more votes. But when you look at the context of this story, it is absolutely one of the most impressive stories to tell, I think.”

The Liberals won a minority government with 169 seats and 43.7 per cent of the vote share. The Conservatives weren’t far behind, with 144 seats and 41.3 per cent of the votes.