Tories pack pub for MacLeod
MacLeod pledges ‘one Nepean’ in campaign launch
When Conservative incumbent MPP Lisa MacLeod kicked off her fifth campaign Sunday, she made it clear that she’s all in with newly minted leader Doug Ford, Megan
Gillis reports.
After endorsing Ford’s decision to axe the candidacy of outspoken social conservative and former leadership hopeful Tanya Granic Allen in a Toronto-area riding, she pitched a new Highway 416 interchange, new schools, cheaper hydro and “one strong Nepean.”
At about the same time, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne’s party was asking Elections Ontario to investigate Ford Nation Live, which produces TV news-style videos with Tory staffers speaking directly to the camera and interviewing supporters using Ford Nation-branded microphones.
The Liberals suggest the gambit by Ford — who has sharply limited his media availability — might violate election finance rules.
Wynne, Ford and NDP leader Andrea Horwath, meantime, were expected to spend much of Monday preparing to square off on the same stage for the first time, days before the official start of the campaign for the June.
Conservative incumbent MPP Lisa MacLeod kicked off her fifth campaign Sunday, packing a former Barrhaven pub for a celebritystudded rally where she declared that “we are one Nepean” even as her party weathered a weekend bombshell.
Before hundreds of people jammed her strip mall headquarters she praised leader Doug Ford’s “strong leadership” and “decisive action” in ditching social conservative former leadership hopeful Tanya Granic Allen as a candidate.
“We’re a big tent party but you have to be responsible in your speech and it can’t border on hate speech,” said MacLeod, 43, the only Progressive Conservative MPP in Ottawa.” I’ve made a career of making sure that I represent everyone in my constituency. It doesn’t matter who they love, who they pray to, where they work.
“I’m all for one Nepean and one Ontario, and so I think Doug made the right decision.”
Video had surfaced showing Granic Allen — who threw her followers to Ford in the party’s leadership race — discussing sex education in Croatia, saying that when she sees the country “trying to push radical sexualization on the young, or gay marriage, I almost vomit in disbelief.”
In a speech to a standing-roomonly crowd, MacLeod pledged to work for a new interchange on Highway 416, collaborate with her mentor, city Coun. Jan Harder, to make traffic safer on Greenbank Road, and with school board trustees to make sure that needed new schools get built.
“I am the only candidate in this race that is capable of delivering one strong, united Nepean,” MacLeod said to cheers.
She echoed her leader’s message of fighting “hallway health care,” making Ontario “open for business,” reducing hydro rates, ending what she called waste, mismanagement and scandal. And she praised Ford as “a very strong, capable, generous, kind soul” whose “grassroots campaign” would win over the province.
The keynote speaker at MacLeod’s campaign launch emceed by former broadcasters Carol Anne Meehan and Kurt Stoodley was Tim Fleiszer, a four-time Grey Cup champion who heads the Concussion Legacy Foundation and praised her for building consensus to pass the first preventive legislation in the country.
“Lisa has made sports safer for young athletes,” he said.