Byelection gets close, then it gets ugly

A closer than expected byelection contest to fill the void left by Jim Flaherty’s death has turned nasty down the home stretch, with the Conservatives accusing the Liberals of running a smear campaign.

The late finance minister took Whitby- Oshawa with a comfortable 58 per cent of the vote in 2011. Yet polls conducted in the final few days of the campaign put the Conservatives and Liberals in a dead heat.

The Conservatives are pulling out all the stops to keep the Ontario riding Tory blue in Monday’s vote.

They’re running a highprofile candidate, former Whitby mayor Pat Perkins.

She’s been endorsed by Flaherty’s widow, Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership front-runner Christine Elliott, and two of Flaherty’s sons are honorary chairs of her campaign.

Cabinet ministers, including Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Finance Minister Joe Oliver, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Treasury Board President Tony Clement, have campaigned with Perkins.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself dropped by Whitby last month to announce the doubling of the children’s fitness tax credit.

Jenni Byrne, the Conservatives’ national campaign director, was spotted by Liberals in the riding Sunday.

Despite running a distant third with 14 per cent of the vote in 2011, the Liberals believe they have a chance of staging an upset.

Their own polling and several public opinion surveys suggest Liberal candidate Celina Caesar-Chavannes, an entrepreneur, research consultant and political newcomer, has steadily closed in on Perkins. The most recent poll, conducted Sunday by Mainstreet Technologies, had the Liberals and Tories tied while NDP support had collapsed.

In a sign of how hot the Whitby- Oshawa contest has become over the past few weeks, various media outlets, including The Canadian Press, were alerted to documents that raised questions about some of Perkins’ mayoral expenses.

These included trips to real estate conferences in Las Vegas and Cannes, France, the installation of a back door to her office, a $345-per-night hotel room for a conference in Ottawa, as well as her handling of two funds controlled by the mayor.

Perkins did not respond to a request for an interview, but a spokesman said all expenses were above board, as was her handling of a Whitby performing arts centre fund and a community development fund.

“Our opposition has been spreading (the documents) to every media outlet from here through to Ottawa for a few weeks now in an attempt to smear Ms. Perkins throughout this campaign,” Wiebe Bergsma said in an email.

At a minimum, Caesar-Chavannes appears certain to vault past her New Democrat rival, Trish McAuliffe, an autoworker and union activist, who ran second against Flaherty in 2011 with a respectable 22 per cent of the vote.