Surma turns red riding blue
PC candidate wins over Liberals’ Yvan Baker, city Liberal since 2003
First- time provincial PC candidate Kinga Surma won in Etobicoke Centre over Liberal incumbent Yvan Baker on Thursday, riding a Tory wave to Queen’s Park. Surma was leading with 43 per cent of the vote in early returns.
The riding with one of the highest proportions of seniors in Canada had been Liberal since 2003, when Donna Cansfield beat Tory Chris Stockwell,
who had held the riding since it was redistributed in 1999.
In this election, Baker ran on his record of advocacy on community mm issues, including con- vincing Mayor John Tory to study the tunnelling of the Eglinton LRT in Etobicoke, and securing provincial funding for it, Baker said at an all- candidates meeting. Surma ran on leader Doug Ford’s FF platform of finding effi- ciencies at Queen’s Park, borrowed heavily from his late brother Rob Ford’s “stop the gravy train” mantra in the 2010 Toronto mayoral campaign.
She entered politics in 2010on the Toronto mayoral election, and afterward at city hall.
Last month, Baker announced an exchange with a Toronto public school board site in the West WW Don Lands in exchange f for the Ontario government as- suming ownership of the former Silver Creek Public School, which ww residents fought to save f from future development.
Silver Creek houses Silver Creek Preschool for children with physical and/ or developmental disabilities, and Etobicoke Children’s Centre, a nonprofit children’s mental health centre.
During an all- candidates debate, Surma took the Liberals to task for “hallway health care” and the recent auditor general’s report that pegged Ontario’s deficit this year at $ 11.7 billion, not $ 6.7 billion as the Liberals have forecast.
Baker described auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s calculations as “a disagreement about accounting principles.”
Baker also challenged the “efficiencies” Ford promises, describing them as “service cuts.”
In 2014, Baker won by a little more than 50 per cent of the vote, and succeeded Cansfield, who ww retired after 11 years as the riding’s Liberal MPP.
Erica Kelly, the NPD candidate, created controversy when she made disparaging comments on Facebook about Second Amendment supporters in the U. S. She later apologized for her comments.