Liberals breathe sigh of relief after Ottawa-Vanier victory
Ontario’s Liberals have some ground to stand on as they fight toward re-election in 2018: They can count on Ottawa-Vanier.
With 117 of 265 polls reporting at 10 o’clock Thursday night, their candidate Nathalie Des Rosiers was handily defeating Progressive Conservative challenger André Marin in the byelection triggered by last summer’s retirement of local saint Madeleine Meilleur. Des Rosiers had 52 per cent of the vote to Marin’s 27 per cent and New Democrat Claude Bisson’s 14 per cent.
Des Rosiers hadn’t showed yet, but cabinet ministers and campaign workers mingled at the bar
of the Knights of Columbus hall on McArthur Avenue, drinking Heinekens and Bud Lights and congratulating one another with no small sense of relief.
They felt they could to go into their annual convention here on the weekend without having to ask themselves what the hell they’re going to do.
“I’m excited,” said Marie-France Lalonde, the MPP for Ottawa-Orléans next door and Meilleur’s successor as Ontario’s leading francophone provincial politician. She paused from greeting volunteers and fellow pols as they arrived in numbers just before 10. “I knew (Des Rosiers) was the best candidate.”
The win validates the Liberal message that Ontario has turned the corner after a bad recession and slow recovery, Lalonde said. The provincial government is building schools and expanding hospitals. “That is who we are,” Lalonde said.
She took a veiled shot at the Progressive Conservatives, whose candidate Sam Oosterhoff won a smashing victory in the night’s other byelection in Niagara West-Glanbrook. Oosterhoff is a 19-year-old social conservative, adamantly pro-life.
“We are inclusive. We are the party of diversity. We’re not going to judge you on who you are, your beliefs,” Lalonde said.
That resonates particularly strongly as Ottawans struggle with the swastikas and racist smears someone has spray-painted on Jewish doors this week, Lalonde said.
For a long time, the legend was that if the Liberals, federal or provincial, were ever wiped out like the federal Progressive Conservatives were after Brian Mulroney, Ottawa-Vanier would be one of the seats they had left. They’ve won it in good times and bad, by tens of thousands of votes.
But this is 2016. Wynne’s government is broadly unpopular. Voters are angry about pocketbook issues like rising electricity prices. The Progressive Conservatives netted a confident battler for a candidate in André Marin, a guy who made his name as provincial ombudsman specifically fighting for individual Ontarians screwed by the system.
Byelections, it can’t be said enough, are weird. They notoriously bring out protest voters in big numbers while people satisfied with the status quo stay at home. Who runs the government isn’t at stake.
And Des Rosiers, as sterling as her résumé is (she’s been a law dean twice, head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, an advocate on multiple fronts), is not Madeleine Meilleur. They’re both lawyers, both francophone women, both polished. But Meilleur, though born in Quebec, is Vanier through and through in a way Des Rosiers is not.
If the Tories could have taken Vanier, they’d have dealt the Liberals a crippling blow. The Liberals had to stop them.
Both the leading parties pulled out every stop. Brown, who won the Progressive Conservative leadership by endless campaigning in every unlikely corner of the province, returned to Ottawa every weekend to knock on doors with Marin and fire up the Tory troops.
Wynne had the busiest month of visits to the capital she’s had as premier, doing relatively little direct campaigning but finding reasons to make government announcements in Ottawa that she’d typically make in Toronto (like promising to allow speed cameras in school zones) or to “highlight” the effect here of Liberal spending across the province (new daycare spaces at a school on McArthur! a new unit at the Queensway Carleton!).
“At the end of the day, we were up against a machine. A machine that is the strongest in the City of Ottawa,” Tory MPP Lisa MacLeod told the Citizen’s Brian Platt at Marin’s victory-party-that-wasn’t at the Hampton Inn on Coventry Road.
Marin’s main message throughout the campaign was that electricity was too expensive, killing businesses and hope. Lalonde said she heard very little about that as she knocked on doors. Hydro prices have soared particularly in rural Ontario, where many people pay a lot for long-distance transmission and heat their homes electrically, but much less so in dense downtown districts.
Ottawa-Vanier was a riding the Liberals had to win to keep from self-destructing, and they did.