THE MESSIER, THE BETTER
Eastern Ontario wins with 3-way race
Regardless whether they win any seats in Eastern Ontario, the threat the surging New Democrats pose to the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives here is disrupting the political balance in our region.
It’s a healthy change. Politics should be messier than they have been here. Politicians should be more frightened for their jobs. Voters should have more options.
Even in the 2003 election, when Ernie Eves’ Progressive Conservatives lost 35 seats and the Liberals won their first majority under Dalton McGuinty, just two Ottawa seats changed hands: Ottawa West-Nepean, where Jim Watson beat Tory backbencher Garry Guzzo, and Ottawa-Orléans, where city councillor Phil McNeely defeated agriculture minister Brian Coburn.
In 15 years, plenty of faces have changed, but the map hasn’t. Liberals have succeeded Liberals, Progressive Conservatives have succeeded Progressive Conservatives, and the New Democrats have never been close anywhere.
No other region has been as static. Elsewhere, Tories have taken rural seats away from Liberals; Liberals have taken Toronto seats away from New Democrats; and New Democrats have nipped at both. But not in Ottawa.
The weakness of the local NDP has created a particularly vicious circle. Not having had an Ottawa MPP since Evelyn Gigantes lost Ottawa Centre in 1995, they’ve had no local spokesperson, nobody who meets with other area politicians regularly to hear and learn — nobody whose duty it is to understand the province’s secondlargest city.
More subtly, they’ve had no conveyor belt carrying workers and ideas from Eastern Ontario to Queen’s Park and back. Ontario has urban residents who aren’t Torontonians, francophones who aren’t northerners, tech workers who aren’t in Waterloo. It’s one thing to know this intellectually, something else to live it.
The North is a bigger part of the party’s thinking just because the NDP has seats there and competes seriously for others. At Queen’s Park, northern New Democrat MPPs regularly hold news conferences to point out problems in hospitals, schools and transportation systems in the North. They never do this for Eastern Ontario because there’s nobody there who can.
Even at their lowest, after the last election, when Kanata’s Jack MacLaren was disgracing himself with dirty jokes and phoney constituent testimonials before leaving the Progressive Conservatives altogether, the Tories had Nepean-Carleton’s Lisa MacLeod waving the Ottawa flag in Toronto and the Tory flag here. She’s pressured the Liberal government on opioids (taking up the concerns of suburban parents whose children have overdosed on stolen or counterfeit pills), on funding for local hospitals and plans for a new Civic campus, on overcrowded schools in fast-growing neighbourhoods.
When the Tories are devising policies and plans, they have someone asking what they’ll mean for The Ottawa Hospital, for the Ottawa Catholic School Board, for Highway 417. The NDP have a say in the legislature and use it to nudge the government’s agenda but they do it without much input from the east.
Without an effective New Democratic Party, Liberals and Tories have been able to focus on very small slivers of votes: centrists in just a few ridings. If there are only two choices, they can count on a lot of default support and target their pitches.
Quebecers struggled with this for years, when the only two real choices were the righ tish-federalist Liberal sand the leftish separatist Part iQuébé co is. If your main concern as a voter was whether Quebec would declare independence, you only had one option, and that meant both parties could take huge swaths of the province for granted. The splintering of Quebec’s parties to create the centrist-nationalist Coalition Avenir Québec and a hard-left Québec solidaire has scrambled the choices. It’s made politics messier but it gives voters a lot more power.
Instead of competing for voters in election campaigns, the real fights in most of Ottawa’s ridings have been in back rooms, for party nominations.
Current polls suggest no Liberal MPP is safe now, but OttawaVanier is as strong a stronghold as the party has. Nathalie Des Rosiers won it in a byelection in 2016, taking over from Madeleine Meilleur who was herself appointed as the Liberal candidate in 2003. Des Rosiers got the Liberal nomination after the Liberal party disqualified 105 new members signed up by her rival, Lucille Collard — about one-fifth of the potential voters — because Collard’s campaign delivered their membership fees the wrong way.
In Ottawa West-Nepean, a seat the Progressive Conservatives looked pretty likely to win when leader Patrick Brown had them riding high, the Tories indulged in the messiest nomination squabble anywhere that didn’t involve a police investigation. The riding executive quit in protest of alleged ballot-stuffing and voter lists that included people whose addresses weren’t even in Ontario. Brown shrugged the whole thing off; his successor, Doug Ford, turfed the candidate, the mother of a Brown staffer and sometime girlfriend, and the Tories got Jeremy Roberts as their man by acclamation.
In theory, you can expect to get away with all kinds of things in nomination battles that would be illegal in a real election. They’re overseen only by party officials. But there’s no way for would-be candidates to fight through these sewage-filled trenches without emerging coated in bad goo, which they trail behind them into office.
Knowing they’re going to have to go through that can be off-putting to people with achievements and experience that could be useful to their parties and to the people. If the real trick to winning a seat is stabbing your fellow partisans in the back with aplomb, politics will tend not to attract the best. Parties that can’t take seats for granted can’t risk behaving badly behind the scenes. In other ridings, parties have had trouble scaring up any candidates at all. Who wants to spend months volunteering every free minute for a hopeless cause? So they run any warm body willing to hoist the banner. Some have been downright embarrassing: Candidates who refer to their own parties as “they,” who aren’t familiar with their policies, who aren’t up on current events.
The New Democrats lucked out in Ottawa Centre this year, with four credible people seeking the party nomination to run against Liberal Yasir Naqvi. The field included a former ambassador, a labour economist and a school trustee. Party members picked Joel Harden, a professional researcher, organizer and sometime academic, in a vote nobody complained about.
His views have caused the NDP some headaches. The Tories have named him repeatedly as one of the NDP’s supposed radicals for his views in favour of carbon taxes (among other things) and the Liberals have gone after him for wanting to merge Catholic and public school boards, neither of which is party policy. But he’s a confident, energetic campaigner and he’s giving Naqvi the biggest scare he’s had in four elections. Downtown Ottawa might very well want what he’s offering.
In Ottawa West-Nepean, New Democrat Chandra Pasma’s campaign has touted a poll by Mainstreet Research showing her leading by a nose. The New Democrats quietly think they have a shot at Ottawa-Vanier and they’re competitive in Ottawa South. It means the Liberals have to protect their left flanks and the Progressive Conservatives have to remember their pocketbook populism. Neither can assume they’ll benefit from the other’s missteps.
Having MPPs from all three parties representing the east at Queen’s Park will be good for the parties, for the government and for us. Ottawans can be at the cabinet table and criticizing the government from all the opposition benches, representing left, centre and right. We’ll all be better off for it.