An Olympian task in battleground 905
VETERAN TORY VS. STAR ATHLETE IN ONTARIO RIDING
Sitting in her campaign office in downtown Milton, Lisa Raitt gives a slightly weary smile when asked how many national media outlets have come to her riding this year.
“Oh yeah, everybody’s been here,” she says. “Some of the TV stations have been here a few times. One of them did a live broadcast hit.”
As a former cabinet minister, then a Conservative leadership candidate, and then a senior MP on the front bench of the opposition caucus, Raitt is used to media attention and is very comfortable speaking to reporters. Even so, it gets a little disruptive to have a constant stream of them coming through while you’re trying to campaign, especially when you’re in a race many pollsters consider a tossup. One recent public poll by Mainstreet for iPolitics showed the race as essentially tied.
Raitt is in the spotlight because she’s squared off against four-time Olympic medallist Adam van Koeverden, arguably the biggest name the Liberals recruited heading into this election. His home city of Oakville, just south of the riding, named a street after him. It gives the race some star power, and that draws media attention. In 2015, the “sexy” races in the Greater Toronto Area were downtown, as the NDP’s quest for government drew high-profile candidates to take on Liberal heavyweights: Linda McQuaig versus Bill Morneau, Olivia Chow versus Adam Vaughan, Jennifer Howlett versus Chrystia Freeland. This year, the big show is in Milton.
It’s not just the candidates who make this rapidly-growing suburb so electorally important. With the poll numbers tightening in the final week and all signs pointing to a minority government, the battleground 905 region will likely settle whether the Liberals or Conservatives emerge with the highest seat count. The NDP candidate for Milton is Farina Hassan and the Greens have Eleanor Hayward, though they are a distant third and fourth in polling.
Liberal campaign staff frequently cite Milton as a GTA seat they have a good shot at picking up; many believe they would have won it in 2015 with a stronger candidate. The Conservatives, by contrast, point out that if Raitt survived the initial Trudeau surge, she’s not likely to be knocked off now.
“Don’t count your chickens,” Raitt responded when these theories are put to her. “Put your head down and work hard.” She said past campaigns have taught her the only thing you can really count on to win is knocking on doors. She also believes the national campaigns are less important here than in other 905 ridings, given her strong name recognition and community reputation.
Raitt has represented this area since 2008 (the riding was redrawn in 2015, shrinking in geographic size by half due to population growth). “You’ve been a good member for us for a long time,” one woman tells Raitt at the door during a Friday afternoon canvass. At another door, a woman tells Raitt she’s still making up her mind, but compliments her work as an MP. Walking away, Raitt logs that voter as “accessible” in her campaign database. “She likes me personally,” Raitt noted. “We’ll send her some material and try to come back.”
There’s no advantage like having been a longtime MP.
But Raitt’s opponent also gets plenty of smiles at the doors. It helps that he’s wearing his jacket from the 2012 London Olympics, where he won silver in the 1,000-metre kayak sprint. The jacket has big red patches on it, including a Canadian flag on the back. “Look, if it was covered in blue, maybe I’d wear something else,” van Koeverden says, walking down a quiet street filled with large, recently-built homes.
This is his first campaign, and he’s clearly enjoying it. “I decided to run last summer because I want to contribute to my country, I feel a deep obligation to serve publicly,” he said. “I’m passionate about this, man. It’s been fun. I’ve really gotten to like the daily grind of getting out there. Just dropping in on events. Pitching in.”
Out on a canvass, he walks quickly and talks even faster, often reeling off anecdotes from recent media articles in his conversations with voters. He has an upbeat attitude, and like many people just entering politics, he insists he’s not in it to attack others. He uses a kayak metaphor: “I always remind myself that I’m in my own lane, and what I can control is how fast I go,” he said. “The impetus behind this is not to prevent other people from winning. The impetus behind this is to make sure that my neighbours have a good advocate in Ottawa.”
Yet it doesn’t take much prompting for van Koeverden to start denouncing the Conservatives. He does it in a particular way, though, focusing on Doug Ford and Andrew Scheer. He even gives the occasional backhanded compliment to Raitt, who ran for the party’s leadership on a centrist platform.
“The Conservative Party is one that has left a lot of people like Lisa Raitt out of the conversation as a progressive conservative,” he said. “There are a few progressive conservatives, Red Tories if you want to call them that, in the Conservative Party, but demonstrated by who they elected as their leader, and what their big issues are in their platform, it’s not who they are.”
This is what happens in a race where both candidates are locally popular. Unlike in the national campaign, the insults are not flying here. Raitt uses the local debates as an example of how she carries herself.
“You don’t go in and hammer at people and you don’t throw bombs at them,” she said. “You have to live here on a daily basis. If I developed a reputation for being mean and nasty at debates, that eventually filters down to my kids as they move in their social circles, or they play sports, or they go to school. That, to me, is unacceptable.”
Raitt also said she has the strong impression that voters have been turned off by the tone of the national campaign, where the discussion has often been more focused on personalities than policies. She said she’s never had so many voters tell her they just want the campaign to be over.
If that’s true, and with the polls getting tighter and tighter, turnout may be the decisive factor in swing ridings like this. In that case, it’s Raitt’s experienced operation up against van Koeverden’s bottomless energy. It remains too close to call.