By IANS,
Vancouver : Heavyweight Indo-Canadian politician Ujjal Dosanjh was finally declared winner from his Vancouver South seat after yet another judicial recount of the vote Tuesday.
However, the margin of his victory was further reduced from 22 votes to 20. It has been reported to be longest recount in Canadian electoral history.
On the election night Oct 14, Dosanjh was declared a winner with a 33-vote margin. But since election laws make a court-supervised recount mandatory if the victory margin is one one-thousandth of the votes cast, a recount was ordered.
After the judge-supervised recount a week later, Dosanjh was declared a winner but with a reduced margin of 22 votes, retaining the seat for the Liberal Party against Wai Young of the ruling Conservative Party – which is still 12 short of the 155-majority mark in the 308-member House of commons.
But Young asked for yet another court-supervised recount of all the ballot boxes.
Dosanjh had won this seat in 2006 with a comfortable margin of 9,000 votes. But with a majority of about 40 percent ethnic Chinese voters in the constituency swinging to his opponent, he barely managed to survive this time.
Indian-born Dosanjh, 61, was the first non-white premier of British Columbia province from February 2000 to May 2001 and later Canada’s health minister from 2004 to 2006.
After the victory, Dosanjh said he would work to improve on his margin next time.