29-04-2025
Federal election 2025: Liberal Jenna Sudds leading in Kanata
Jenna Sudds appeared to be headed to re-election for the Liberals in the federal riding of Kanata as results began flowing in on Monday night.
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With about 12.5 per cent of polls reporting, the former Ottawa city councillor had 2,427 votes compared to 1,517 for Conservative Greg Kung. The NDP's Melissa Simon ranked a distant third with 117.
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Sudds first vaulted from municipal politics to the federal stage in 2021, winning her Kanata-Carleton seat in a hotly-contested 2021 federal election.
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She won the riding by just 1,921 votes four years ago, based on a 73.4 per cent turnout of 86,505 eligible voters, prevailing over Conservative candidate Jennifer McAndrew, who received 38.6 per cent of the vote, while Sudds received 41.8 per cent.
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Before Sudds won in 2021, the former Kanata-Carleton riding had been held by Liberal Karen McCrimmon, who won comfortably in 2015 and again in 2019. McCrimmon declined to run federally in 2021, but has since made the move to Queen's Park, winning a July 2023 by-election for the Kanata-Carleton provincial riding and winning re-election in the provincial general election in February.
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Sudds, a former federal government economist and executive director of two business associations, served in former prime minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet as the minister of families, children and social development until the March 14 cabinet shuffle that followed Mark Carney's swearing-in as Trudeau's successor.
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A West-Carleton resident and full-time paramedic serving the Ottawa Valley, Kung was also a senior advisor to former Conservative finance ministers Jim Flaherty and Joe Oliver. Kung has been on the boards of Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre, the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa Foundation and the Ontario Paramedic Association.
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The NDP finished a distant third in the riding in the 2021 federal election with 14 per cent of the vote.
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A former technical writer for a Kanata tech company until she was recently laid off, Simon has lived in Kanata for more than two decades and has a bachelor's degree in social work from Carleton University. She is completing a law degree at Carleton.
