Dave Smith joins Ford Nation at Queen’s Park
Progressive Conservative candidate wins tight race, incumbent longtime Liberal MPP Jeff Leal defeated
Dave Smith is Peterborough’s new MPP, joining a majority Progressive Conservative government taking shape around party leader Doug Ford.
A close race provincewide between the PCs and the NDP was mirrored in Peterborough-Kawartha as Smith edged the NDP’s Sean Conway. Liberal incumbent Jeff Leal came in a distant third, with the Green Party’s Gianne Broughton in fourth place.
Final numbers were not available at press time.
Smith walked into his victory party on Thursday evening at the Holiday Inn with his wife Lorien, and thanked his crowd of supporters profusely for their work.
He didn’t take all the credit for the win – he told the crowd present that they’d worked hard to get him elected.
“I can’t say it enough – it really is a group effort,” he said. “It is thanks to all of you – you realized Ontario needed a change – a change for the better.”
Smith, 48, is the manager of product development at Cardinal Software on Lansdowne St. The firm creates software for the development of Individualized Education Programs — IEPs — for public school pupils who need a custom curriculum.
Smith and his wife Lorien have a blended family of three children; all three are in university.
She said the campaign was hard work. “I don’t think we really appreciated the time and effort that it would really take and it really has been about the team,” she said at the Holiday Inn Thursday night.
Son Jake Smith said he was proud of his father. “It’s pretty cool,” he said. “He’s been working hard for it. It’s something he’s been wanting for a while so it’s nice to see him get it. He’s very excited, I can tell.”
Smith has an MBA in Business Analytics from the University of Fredericton. That’s in addition to his Bachelor of Science in Computing Systems from Trent University; he moved here to attend Trent in 1989, and has made Peterborough his
home since.
He’s the founder of the Under the Lift Lock hockey tournament.
In 2013 he organized Hockey Day in Canada on the canal in just 26 days, when it took six months to organize the same event in other cities.
He also took over organizing an international hockey tournament for young special-needs players in Peterborough last year, after the organizers, Dave and Cathie Tuck, were arrested following allegations of misspent team funds.
In March 2017, more than 900 special needs hockey players from 56 teams from North America and Europe came to Peterborough for the tournament.
In keeping with his interest in hockey, Smith handed out custom jerseys to his campaign team - and one especially for his wife, too.
“It’s a beautiful day to change Ontario,” said Ford, who only became PC leader March 10 after the resignation of Patrick Brown, as he cast his ballot earlier in the day in Etobicoke.
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, who polls at one point suggested could win the day, will be the leader of the opposition.
“Regardless of the result tonight, I’m really proud of our team,” Horwath said in Toronto before polls closed at 9 p.m.
Green Leader Mike Schreiner, who once ran for the party in Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock, became his party’s first MPP by winning in Guelph.
This is the first election in the newly created provincial Peterborough-Kawartha riding, which was created after the last election to match the boundaries of the federal riding of the same name.
The riding was called just “Peterborough” before that. It has been a bellwether riding for decades, electing MPPs from the winning party in every vote since 1977.
Leal has held it since 2003, when he defeated PC incumbent Gary Stewart. Leal was re-elected in 2007, 2011 and 2013, at which point he entered cabinet as Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. He later added small business to his portfolio.
With his wife Karan, Leal visited Smith’s party on Thursday evening to congratulate him.
Stewart held the riding from 1995 to 2003, with the NDP’s Jenny Carter in office from 1990-1995 during Bob Rae’s government.
The riding alternated between
NDP and PC (Walter Pitman, John Turner, Gillian Sandeman, Turner again) between 1967 and 1987, when Peter Adams started a three-year term as Liberal MPP under David Peterson’s government.
Between Harold Robinson Scott and Keith Brown, the PCs held the riding from 1943 to 1967.
The riding covers the city and rural areas, but does not encompass all of Peterborough County.
Some voters in area townships vote in Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock, while others vote in the newly created Northumberland-Peterborough South.
Over the course of election day, some voters reached out to The Examiner with concerns about issues at polling stations.
A voter contacted The Examiner on Thursday afternoon to say there were issues at the polling station at Northview Pentecostal Church.
The lineup grew as voters encountered problems with their addresses, with the Elections Ontario system listing them as living in Selwyn rather than Peterborough.
That meant their identification didn’t match their voter cards, he said.
People living in new subdivisions were having particular issues, he said, and some left without voting.
- With files from Joelle Kovach, Tanner Morton, Julia Lloyd, Marissa Lentz and The Toronto Star