In Oakville, the ground war continues. From the Mississauga like subdivisions in the eastern part of the riding westward through the longer established areas and on to the neighbourhoods near to Burlington, volunteers seek to identify supporters amidst the undecided and the many homes where nobody answers the door either because they are out or just do not feel like it. Although only the Liberal and CPC candidates have any where near enough volunteers to attempt this task, there are signs of a growing Green Party presence in that their signs are appearing on homes. Green’s growth could be more trouble for Liberal Bonnie Brown.

It has been worth the effort from the CPC point of view to door knock all homes – including ones with Liberal Bonnie Brown signs. It feels like panning for gold. For the most part, the reception is polite – even at homes with Liberal signs. Sometimes CPC supporters are found in those homes. In any case, the CPC teams are able to canvass areas fairly quickly because they have many volunteers.

Candidates have All Candidates Meetings to attend that pull them away from meeting and swaying undecided voters.. They may be useful for getting quotes in the local media but as far as being informative, many to most people who attend All Candidates Meetings are active partisans there to cheer on their candidate.

Terrence Young has come out with a new piece of literature that debunks certain claims made by the Liberals. It has some amusing jabs. Some of Bonnie Brown’s previous statements have been shown to be ridiculous.

Terrence Young has been helping out people in Oakville over the last two years while working at his day job. He has had a degree of flexibility that Bonnie Brown’s office lacked. Not everybody in Oakville lives in palatial lakeside mansions.

Up in Halton, which includes the norther part of the municipality of Oakville, Liberal Garth Turner is holding on primarily due to fluctuating national and regional trends. CPC candidate Lisa Raitt would serve the Halton riding well if elected but Turner is fighting for his political life here. During the dying days of the 1993 PC debacle, Turner managed to fire one more torpedo into the sinking SS Kim Campbell when he made pro Liberal remarks. Raitt might benefit if Turner fires another torpedo with the safeties disengaged so that it comes back and blows his own campaign out of the water.

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.

As someone whose interests and research intersects politics and space, I must admit that I am a sucker for maps. Especially pretty ones! So I thought I would highlight this one that the Toronto Star recently published showing how every single polling station voted last time in the Greater Toronto Area. Click on it to download the full size version (but be warned: it is 5.3mb).

A few basic things to note:

1. The Liberal red in the map is virtually synonymous with the urbanized parts of the GTA (i.e. the Conservative blue areas on the urban fringe are primarily undeveloped areas, not yet consumed by the GTA’s onward expansion).

2. The most heavily urbanized areas at the core of Toronto vote NDP (except for the downtown Toronto Centre riding, which votes Liberal). The only other area where the NDP does well is in Oshawa, but since the Oshawa riding takes in a good chunk of the urban fringe, it typically goes Conservative.

3. The Conservatives do have a stronghold in the affluent areas in the Don Valley West riding (indeed this is the only seat they have a chance of winning). Otherwise, there are only isolated pockets of Conservative support in Etobicoke and North York.

In any election there are usually hard cores of supporters that will show up to do the grunt work of campaigns – the door knocking, the phoning, the sign placing and so many other tasks.   When a campaign is going well, more peripherally engaged people begin to show up at the campaign office.  It’s not easy to knock on someone’s door or phone a stranger.  If people believe they will not get a bad reception, they are more likely to volunteer.  Conversely, while a core suporter can withstand negative responses, more marginally engaged people are likely to find it difficult to do so.

Terence Young’s campaign is having good days.  Volunteers are plentiful but yet all feel needed as this race is still tight. 

Over at Bonnie Brown’s campaign, they may feel they are reliving the nightmare last days of ‘Asphalt Annie’ Mullvales’s doomed PC campaign in 1993.  Volunteers are becoming fewer as the the SS Dion takes on water dragging down Liberal candidares in the process.  Bonnie Brown is unlikely to survive the SS Dion shipwreck.

The anti Harper sentiment, although shrinking, is likely to find expression in NDP and Green support according to what non CPC supporters are saying. 

The Blue wave had swept into Oakville in 2006 but some last minute Liberal scare tactics caused it to retreat somewhat from the Mississauga border.  There will likely not be a repeat of the same phenomenon this time. 

Barring a knockout blow of Harper by Dion in the English language debate, the deal is done.  Terence Young will be elected MP for Oakville on October 14, 2008.  How many want to bet on such an event?  Not too many, I think.

Up in Halton, the CPC candidate is gaining thanks to blunders by Liberal Garth Turner caught on CPAC.  The Dion Train Wreck is also threatening to include Garth in the mangled wreckage soon to result from Dion’s leadership.  Initial resentment against Lisa Raitt’s appointment as CPC candidate is fading among previously upset CPC supporters as the prospect of getting rid of Turner grows stronger.

In my typically even-handed way, I now turn to the Conservative candidate for Thornhill, Peter Kent, who happens to be a senior member of an outfit called the Canadian Coalition for Democracies.

What is the CCD?

It’s a group that appears to enjoy fomenting anti-Muslim hysteria. The organization even sucked in that indefatigable anti-Muslim campaigner and promoter of campus snitch lines, Daniel Pipes. Pipes was forced to retract comments he made about Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, which had been based upon misinformation received from CCD. (Pipes refers in his screed to Ezra Levant’s further smears of Alghabra, which I dealt with some time ago, and makes additional defamatory remarks that need not concern us here.)

CCD’s legal counsel has been none other than David Harris, whose inflammatory anti-Muslim commentary is notorious in its own right, and who has recently been fussing out loud about “out-of-control immigration.” Harris was in the news last year making some credulous public comments about a hilariously silly “bugged money” story emanating from the US Defence Security Service.

Here is part of CCD’s statement of purpose:

“At CCD, we believe that our foreign policy should reflect our respect for life and liberty. If we want peace, we must support beleaguered allies who share our Canadian values. Instead, many in our past governments have made it their career to condemn and criticize the United States and Israel, while being apologists for terrorists who celebrate the killing and maiming of men, women, and children. [emphasis mine --DD]”

CCD does not name those “many” in previous Canadian governments who have “been apologists for terrorists.” But this kind of shrill, defamatory, McCarthyite rhetoric is par for the course. Check out these CCD media topics for yourselves, and take particular note of the often hateful rhetoric in which they are couched.

Does Peter Kent’s association with this extremist group merit some attention from bloggers and the media–and from Muslims in the Thornhill riding?

[Thx to Firebrand for the suggestion.]

UPDATE: Reader Buckets reminds us that CCD was one of the infamous “42 organizations” demanding the firing of Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin for chairing the committee that awarded the Order of Canada to Dr. Henry Morgentaler. Read all about that bogus complaint here.

UPPERDATE: A reader pointed me to this press release from CCD (David Harris), urging political and diplomatic relations with the Indian state of Gujurat. Why Gujurat? Could it have anything to do with the militant anti-Islamism of the government there–documented by Human Rights Watch?

The CPC sent in Diane Ablonczy to help out in Oakville on Thursday September 18 as she has her own riding in Calgary locked up. The CPC national campaign team would not waste time sending their strong MP’s into hopeless ridings or ones they will almost certainly win. Terence Young has been door knocking since being nominated to run again for the CPC after his narrow loss in 2006. The mix of national trends and local hard work by Mr. Young and his team should finally move the current incarnation of Oakville into the CPC column. The Liberals seem to be flogging Bonnie Brown as some kind of opposition crusader seemingly conceding that their national campaign is a bust. Ms. Brown should have showed in the House once in a while if that was the way she wanted to brand herself.

Halton is a more difficult situation for the CPC. Garth Turner will get the Liberal core vote plus some CPC supporters annoyed with the way the CPC candidate, Lisa Raitt, was appointed and parachuted into the riding. She is certainly well qualified and should get the core CPC vote. This riding voted for a provincial PC turned federal Liberal (Gary Carr) in 2004. Whether it will vote for a CPC turned Liberal in the person of Garth Turner remains to be seen.

Assuming another election is a few years away, the Oakville and Halton electoral boundaries are likely to be reconfigured follwing the next round of electoral district redistribution.

This is a potentially significant endorsement — the mayor of Canada’s largest city (and the man who receives the most votes in any election in Canada!), former NDPer David Miller, says that the Green Party has the best platform for cities. Miller is particularly impressed with this Green commitment (from David Curry article in today’s Globe):

“Restoring the GST to 6 per cent from its currently 5 per cent, and transferring that revenue to cities for environmental infrastructure projects such as public transit. That last pledge received praise Tuesday from Toronto Mayor David Miller, a former New Democrat, who told a local radio station the Greens have the best policies for cities.”

What do you think, are the Greens the best choice for cities?

This local election in Newmarket-Aurora will likely be a hard fought race between the Liberal and Conservative candidates.

First time candidate and former Mayor of Aurora, Tim Jones, will run for the Liberals. He takes over from Liberal MP Belinda Stronach who decided to leave politics and not seek re-election. He has a lot of experience and is well know locally.

Lois Brown, business owner, will run again for the Conservatives. She ran in the last election, placing second after Belinda Stronach. With Ms. Stronach (who benefited from her well-known status and strong following) now gone and solid showing of Conservative support in the polls, Ms. Brown hopes to win this electoral district. Judging by the number of lawn signs, she is definitely moving in that direction.

From what I’ve read, Mike Seaward, former trade unionist, will run again for the NDP after representing the party in the last provincial election.

Glenn Hubbers, professional engineer and project manager, runs again for the Greens. He hopes to build on the Greens rise in popularity as well as the recent provincial election where Green candidate John McRogers won 9% of the vote. He placed third after the NDP. This time around, the Green campaign hopes to capture 10-15% of the vote. This would be around 3 times the vote obtained back in the 2006 election.

At the moment this looks to be a tight race and will be interesting to see who pulls through to win the riding.

Looking at the riding to the north, York-Simcoe, the race is most certain. This large rural riding is prime Conservative territory. Peter Van Loan, the Conservative candidate as well as Cabinet minister, who won the last two Federal elections, is expected to win here with ease. Judith Moses is running for the Liberals. She has a lot of political experience working with government ministers and within the Privy Council. John Dewar will run again for the Greens. Like Mr. Hubbers, he’s an excellent green candidate and should do well. Also, Sylvia Gerl will run again for the NDP.

Terence Young’s campaign office was swamped with volunteers on Saturday September 13 as the campaign ramped up into the next phase.  He has been campaigning ever since he narrowly lost in 2006.  He will likely win this time.  While the CPC may be less successful in Mississauga, Vaughn, Markham, Oakridges and Pickering, it should finally be able to win ridings such as Newmarket-Aurora – and Oakville.  Liberal MP Bonnie Brown may have finally run out of luck.

Halton is another question altogether as Liberal Garth Turner has built up a following and the CPC has parachuted in Lisa Raitt from Toronto.

On the weekends, when I am not overwhelmed with school work, I work as a delivery driver. Yesterday, driving around many different parts of Toronto and Cambridge, I couldn’t help but notice that in most ridings, the conservatives were the only party with lawn signs. I understand they had a leg up in predicting the election timing, and were able to start production a little early, but did the Liberals not see this election coming? I’ve barely seen any liberal signs (although maybe this is the first primer on their significant drop in the polls). Even on my personal front, I ordered my NDP sign almost a week ago and have yet to receive it.

Most surprising might have been the NDP signs that advertised the “team of Jack Layton” and not the actual riding candidate. Its an interesting strategy considering the stark shift in this election campaign’s spotlight away from party platforms towards the individual leader’s capabilities. This may be one election where Jack Layton actually seems more capable than his leadership counterparts.

Also, has anyone else had fun playing with the policy slot machine on www.notaleader.ca? It is absolutely hilarious. The conservatives have outdone themselves once again.

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.