It was a roller coaster night for the New Democrat Party here in Timmins. Gilles Bisson was quickly announced winner of the new Timmins Riding shortly after the polls closed Thursday night.

His win is bitter sweet as the Progressive Conservatives won the majority government, leaving the NDP as official opposition and the Liberals with only seven seats, forcing them to relinquish their official party status.

Bisson was greeted by a cheering crowd at the Dante Club last night, shortly after he was announced as winner for Timmins. At that point, it was starting to become clear that the PC’s would win the majority. With his win, Bisson acknowledged how bitter sweet it felt to win in his riding when the province voted Doug Ford and the PC Party into a majority government.

“Just looking at those results, it’s bittersweet,” he told the crowd. “I’m going to be honest with you. I was hoping for an NDP government because I really do believe we could have really had something going here in Ontario. And looked at how we moved things forward together. So that all of us in this province, north, south, east, and west, are able to benefit from what this province has to offer.”

Bisson went on to say that the negative tone of Doug Ford’s campaign seems to have reached voters.

“Negative works,” he told media. “I hate to say it, but we were actually leading up until about a week and a half ago. Doug Ford decided to go negative and just say falsehoods, to be quite blunt.”

But Bisson says that won’t deter him from working with the PC government at Queen’s Park to get things done for Northern Ontarians.

“You work with what’s there,” he said. “One thing I’ve learnt over 28 years, you can’t go to Queen’s Park and just say ‘You know, I’m not going to work with these guys.’ I’ll work with Doug Ford; I’ll work with whoever I have to work with to get to where we got to go.”

One of the goals Bisson has already outlined as a priority is getting a deal with Noront to get their ferrochrome smelter location in Timmins.

“Noront, Noront, Noront,” Bisson said when asked what his top priority is now. “I just met with Mr. Coutts and Steve when they were in Timmins a few days ago. We were talking about their work in order to finalize where the final ferrochrome facility’s going to be. I think Timmins is in the running. That’s something we’re all going to work on very well together because I think Timmins is a natural fit. We’ve got the Ontario Northland, we have the Brownfield site that we can go to. We’ve got the gas, we’ve got the hydro; we’ve got everything we need. So that’s going to be the big one.”

Despite the NDP party now being in official opposition to the PC majority, Bisson still has faith that the PC and NDP parties can work together to get things done, now that the election is over.

“This is really the key in Northern Ontario: between elections, we work together. We understand you don’t go out and bash each other between elections. You work together.”

Bisson was thankful to have won his eighth consecutive win in Northern Ontario, and as he told media last night, he will be running again in four years.

“I’m doing the whole term and I’m running again,” Bisson said. “I’m telling you right now, Gilles Bisson will be on the ballot in the next election. Period. So let’s put that one aside right away. I’m 61, I’ll be 65. There’s a while bunch of people that are a lot older than that that are still running. My health is still good, I will run again.”