I attended a Candidates’ Meeting at Thornhill Secondary School on October 6, 2008. All four candidates attended – Susan Kakis (Liberal), Peter Kent (Conservative), Norbert Koehl (Green), and Simon Strelchik (NDP).

The format of the evening consisted of a brief introduction by each candidate, the opportunity for each candidate to ask a question of another candidate, and finally the candidates taking questions from voters.

Susan Kadis is the incumbent and has been an MP since 2004. Prior to federal politics she was a Vaughan councillor and school trustee. I’ve never had interaction with her but I understand she does pretty good constituency work.

Peter Kent, a former TV journalist, is the star candidate who has been parachuted into the riding. Though as he noted, he had moved into a heritage home in Thornhill over the summer. The home was purchased 2 years ago and has undergone considerable renovations since then. Kent ran against Carolyn Bennett in St.Paul’s back in 2006 and lost by 15,000 votes. The race is much closer in Thornhill.

Simon Strelchik is a community activist and a veteran of several municipal and federal campaigns. But he is barely 20 years old and frankly I am a little put off when a candidate that young runs for Parliament. Norbert Koehl is a local businessman who manages a commercial bakery in Toronto.

Each candidate pretty much stuck to their party’s platform which means all you need to do was go in the Internet and to get their position on issues. Therefore, I’m not going to bother reviewing their responses to questions and instead provide some general impressions.

Much of Strelchik’s responses were read from prepared notes. He sounded like a real ideologue except when he spoke without his notes. When he spoke without notes he actually had real passion to his voice instead of a theatrical tone. He seems very bright though on a question regarding equalization, he appeared not to understand the issue. After his response, the moderator repeated the question for all the candidates.

Koehl really connected with the audience. He is a soft spoken and thoughtful man who seemed to have a good grasp of the issues. He has the least amount of political experience which means he attempted to answer all questions directed at him. I quite liked him.

I did not care Kent. He avoided answering quite a number of questions and some responses were totally inappropriate. On a question regarding help for low income seniors who may not benefit from tax cuts (because their incomes are so low), he offered – income splitting! On the question regarding equalization, he used it to attack Premier McGuinty. I could only interpret his response to say that he would not be going to Ottawa to fight to protect the interests of Ontarian but only to help Peter Kent. When he had the opportunity to ask Koehl a question, he opened with some comment about how Elizabeth May was running as a Liberal because there is no Liberal candidate in Central Nova. What relevance that has in Thornhill escapes me.

Kadis seemed to switch back and forth between political rhetoric and meaningful information. She took ample opportunities to attack the Conservative government but she was that as skilled at going on the attack. Her strength was when she got to talk about key local issues – pollution, mass transit, infrastructure.

Kadis won in 2004 and 2006 by about 10,000 votes. However, this time around the contest will be very close race between the Liberal and Conservative candidates.

Thornhill may not turn out to be much of a race. Afterall Liberal Susan Kadis won the elections in 2006 and 2008 by margins of approximately 10,000 votes. Conservatives are going with former journalist Peter Kent who is likely the Tories’ highest profile candidate in the Toronto area.

A member of the Green Party for over three years, candidate Norbert Koehl won the nomination contest over the previous election’s Green Party candidate to earn his first spot on the ballot, while NDP candidate and president of the Thornhill NDP riding association, Simon Strlchik gets his second chance to represent Thornhill in Ottawa.In the past 2 elections the NDP received about 7% of the votes and the Green Party only 3%.
The riding has one of the highest average family incomes in the country at over $100,000 and close to 50% of the riding is Jewish. In the past Jewish voters in the riding have affected the outcome in elections. The 2007 Ontario election saw the Conservative go down to defeat over the issue of public funding for private religious schools. However in Thornhill Conservative Peter Shurman beat the incumbent, Mario Racco as a result of the school funding issue. So you will see lots of pandering to Jewish voters during the campaign.

With the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah three weeks away, greeting cards from the prime minister began arriving this week, bringing with them the same sort of questions that accompanied last year’s mailout. However, there was some displeasure from the community on the choice of the election date. It falls on the Jewish holiday, Sukkot. Meanwhile Susan Kadis had introduced Bill C-547 in the spring which if passed would create a Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Around the same time Harper’s Jewish New Years cards were arriving at home in the riding, so were cards from Kadis asking whether residents supported Bill C-547.

Susan Kadis has been an elected representative in Thornhill since 1988 when she was elected as a school trustee. She moved on to Vaughan council in 1997 and Parliament in 2004. Peter Kent ran for the Conservatives in 2004 in the Toronto riding of St. Paul’s where he lost to Liberal Carolyn Bennett by 13,000 votes. There has been some grumbling about Kent’s residency. He had bought an historic home in Markham 2 years ago but he didn’t actually move in until the past August after some lengthy renovations.