Toronto Centre a pivotal federal race

TORONTO — The Rob Ford show isn’t the only political drama unfolding in Canada’s biggest city these days. For the past five weeks, federal political hopefuls have trotted door to door talking about how they’ll improve life for the middle class if voters in the riding of Toronto Centre favour them in Monday’s byelection.

Recent opinion polls suggest the Liberals, who have represented the riding since 1993 — most recently with former interim leader Bob Rae in the seat — will scoop up the riding again. Indeed, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who took the party’s reins this spring, thinks anything less than a victory will be a blow not just to the party, but to his leadership.

“What is at stake is, in general, the question: Can the Liberals arrest the slide that we’ve been on for the past decade?” he told Postmedia News. “We went from 173 seats in the House of Commons in 2000, down to 135, to 100, to 77, to 35. That’s a full-on slide.”

So this byelection and three others taking place the same day — one in Quebec, two in Manitoba — are crucial for the Liberals, who must hold their ground at the very least.

The Toronto Centre race, focused on Liberal “star” candidate Chrystia Freeland and NDP “star” Linda McQuaig, is fixated on the “squeezed” middle class. The two former journalists and authors have both written extensively about income inequality and aren’t afraid to go head to head about who offers

“Can the Liberals arrest the slide that we’ve been on for the past decade?”

LIBERAL LEADER JUSTIN TRUDEAU

a more realistic fix for the apparent problem. The election of either would clearly have a significant impact on their party federally.

While McQuaig advocates for increased corporate taxes, Freeland says no one can offer a “magic bullet” for fixing income inequality. She argues that government needs to develop “creative approaches” to helping the middle class that don’t involve higher taxes for anyone.

McQuaig, a former Toronto Star columnist, stresses her “deep roots” in the riding, while pointing out that Freeland, previously the managing editor at Thomson Reuters in New York, has spent much of her professional life outside Canada (Freeland was also deputy editor of the Globe and Mail from 1999 to 2001).

Freeland has talked about her opponent being “chummy” with late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, a reference to McQuaig’s 2013 Toronto Star column that praised the controversial figure for challenging western control of oil production.

In the days leading up to the election, both candidates were hot on the campaign trail, butting heads in public debates, making appearances at community events and meeting with voters.

A few were doubtful the New Democrats could take the riding. “I liked (the late NDP leader) Jack Layton, but then I kind of lost touch,” one resident admitted to McQuaig.

But the Liberal leader’s star power is hard to ignore. This past week, when Trudeau accompanied Freeland to a meet-and-greet at the University of Toronto, he could barely take two steps without being surrounded by students begging to have their photo taken with him.

In 2011, Rae took the riding with 41 per cent of the vote after having won the 2008 election with 54 per cent of the vote. The NDP collected 30 per cent of the vote in 2011, up from 15 per cent in 2008.