Sangaree’s son elected to Canadian parliament

20 October 2015 06:23 am

Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) leader V. Anandasangaree’s son Gary Anandasangaree has won the new riding of Scarborough-Rouge Park for the Liberal party, beating the Conservatives after the party dropped candidate Jerry Bance late in the campaign.

Anandasangaree surged ahead of the the other candidates with an overwhelming majority of the vote. Conservative Leslyn Lewis came in a distant second, followed by NDP candidate Rev. Kantharatnam Shanthikumar.

The riding was thought to be a close three-way race, but Bance was dropped in September after he was reportedly caught on camera urinating in a coffee cup in 2012 in a highly publicized scandal.

The departure of Bance left the party scrambling to find a new candidate late in the race, opting for Lewis as a fill-in candidate.

The riding is brand new in this election and was created by combing pieces of three others: the eastern portion of what used to be Scarborough-Rouge River, the Scarborough portion of the former Pickering-Scarborough East and part of Scarborough-Guildwood.

Scarborough-Rouge Park stretches from York region south to Lake Ontario.

If the boundaries were the same in the 2011 federal election, voters would have voted 34.8 per cent Liberal, 31.6 per cent Conservative, and 31 per cent NDP. (Global News)