5 OTTAWA RIDINGS TO WATCH

Last election, no local ridings changed hands. This time, with polls suggesting the governing Liberals might fall to third place provincewide, more ridings are in play than in any year since 2003. Here’s a roundup of the interesting races, writes

KANATA-CARLETON

The current MPP is Jack MacLaren, who became the Trillium party’s first legislator after quitting the Progressive Conservatives. He’s had a difficult term, marred by scandals over his dirty-joke routine at a charity fundraiser and invented constituents’ testimonials on his website. He’s running for reelection and appears to be carrying with him a loyal core of supporters from his days in the populist Ontario landowners’ movement, but another term is a long shot.

The Progressive Conservative candidate is Merrilee Fullerton, an activist former doctor (she gave up practising in 2014) who sat on Ottawa’s board of health and has been sharply critical of the way the Liberals have managed the health system. The Tories consider her a star candidate, likely cabinet material in a PC government, though her advocacy for more “hybrid” care, letting patients pay for more services out of pocket or through private insurance, got her targeted by the Liberals as an advocate of two-tier medicine.

She beat retired police staff sergeant Rick Keindel for the nomination, one of the few contests for a likely Progressive Conservative seat here that didn’t feature a controversy.

A newly redistributed riding, Kanata-Carleton is more urban than its main predecessor, Carleton-Mississippi Mills, with more Kanatans than Carletonians, and its voters chose Liberal Karen McCrimmon as their federal MP in 2015. The Liberal candidate is Stephanie Maghnam, an entrepreneur and longtime resident with an extensive volunteer record with local organizations.

Fullerton’s the favourite here, especially given the provinciallevel Tory lead, but MacLaren’s presence in the race could scramble the table enough to make it interesting.

OTTAWA WEST-NEPEAN

Whichever party wins Ottawa West-Nepean often gets to be the government, so it’s flipped back and forth regularly between Liberals and Progressive Conservatives. Bob Chiarelli, the former mayor of Ottawa, has been the Liberal MPP since a 2010 byelection, his second stint in provincial office, and both Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne have trusted him with hard, heavily technical cabinet portfolios including transportation, energy and infrastructure. Those jobs have put him in charge of some of the most controversial Liberal policies, especially on hydro, and there’s no local MPP the Tories would love to send into retirement more.

He’s up against Tory Jeremy Roberts, who became the candidate by acclamation after leader Doug Ford turfed previous candidate Karma Macgregor. (Macgregor initially defeated Roberts for the nomination in a vote even the local riding-association president denounced as fraud-ridden.) Roberts is much younger but has years of experience as an aide to federal Conservative ministers under his belt. He doesn’t have a resumé to rival Chiarelli’s or the same practice at campaigning, but he’s a more experienced politico than Chiarelli has previously faced.

The NDP candidate, Chandra Pasma, is a researcher for the Canadian Union of Public Employees and a former adviser to the federal New Democrats. The NDP have not historically done better than a distant third, even when their candidates are known figures like trustees and ex-city councillors, but they’ve polled well enough to deny majorities to the winning candidates.

Chiarelli’s not a fiery campaigner but he takes the nuts-and-bolts work of rounding up votes very, very seriously. Whatever happens here, expect the result to be close.

GLEN GARRY PRESCOTT RUSSELL

With the departure of two-term Liberal MPP Grant Crack, the riding that extends from east Ottawa to the Quebec border beyond Alexandria is up for grabs. It’s historically been Liberal turf, but voted Conservative federally when Stephen Harper was prime minister.

The Progressive Conservative candidate is Amanda Simard, a Russell Township councillor, lawyer and Parliament Hill staffer. She’s up against Pierre Leroux for the Liberals, who’s the mayor of Russell and variety-store owner. Leroux was nominated quickly by the Liberals after Crack announced his departure, though — depending whom you believe — he’d been approached by the Tories as a possible replacement for Simard or begged them to ditch Simard and install him instead.

No other party has contended here but in the last two elections the New Democrats drew more than 12 per cent of the vote, enough to deny Crack majorities — the most successful was Bonnie Jean-Louis, who’s running again. Whenever a sitting politician leaves, a pickup for other parties always gets more likely.

ORLÉANS

Another riding that has flipped between Liberals and Conservatives, this time the Liberals’ Marie-France Lalonde is running for re-election after first going to the legislature in 2014. The former social-worker and retirementhome administrator has shot up the ranks in cabinet from whip to minister of corrections and community safety and took on jail reform, an important and worthy cause that has practically no votes in it. She’s also taken over championing Franco-Ontarians from Madeleine Meilleur.

The Tories are running Cameron Montgomery, a fluently bilingual professor at the University of Ottawa who first sought the nomination in the Ottawa-Vanier byelection that followed Meilleur’s retirement from provincial office. The party bigfooted him with star candidate André Marin and Montgomery shifted to run in Orléans, though it’s not where he lives. He’s not a perfect candidate — Orléans tends to like its own sons and daughters, and the last Tory to win was longtime Cumberland mayor Brian Coburn — but if the Ford message resonates in suburban Ottawa as well as it does in suburban Toronto, Lalonde might be in some danger. Although no other party has previously been a factor here.

OTTAWA CENTRE

Yasir Naqvi has been a high-flyer since he was first elected in 2007, rising to become attorney general. He’s grappled with justice reform and policing issues, particularly after the death of his constituent Abdirahman Abdi following a rough arrest in 2016. Naqvi is energetic and highly visible in his riding, despite his cabinet duties, and in 2014 he won a smashing victory over school trustee Jennifer McKenzie, who ran for the New Democrats.

If the Liberals suffered a wipeout, though, Naqvi might be taken down from the left. The NDP haven’t won a seat east of Oshawa since 1990, and they ’re hamstrung by a lack of manpower in Eastern Ontario now. But from 1990 to 1995 (and on and off before then), they had Ottawa Centre.

The riding has elected New Democrats federally (Ed Broadbent and Paul Dewar) and municipally (Diane Holmes and Catherine McKenney). New Democrat candidate Joel Harden is a researcher and campaigner, most recently for the Canadian Federation of Students, and organized his way to the party nomination over an impressive list of alternatives: a labour economist, a career diplomat and a sitting trustee. This election looks like the NDP’s best chance in Ottawa Centre in decades.