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rfmcdonaldIn "A Day at the Races", Jonathan Goldsbie looks at five different election races in Toronto ridings. Thus, Eglinton-Lawrence:
RECENT HISTORY Eglinton-Lawrence was solidly Liberal from its 1979 inception until the last general election, and the party very much hopes to reclaim it as rightfully theirs. Joe Volpe won the seat seven times, but his margins against Conservative candidates gradually shrank through the post-Chrétien era, the backslide culminating with retired investment banker Joe Oliver trouncing him 46.8 per cent to 38.4 in 2011. The NDP candidate, Justin Chatwin, took an 11.6 per cent share of the vote, one of their better showings here.
DYNAMICS Oliver was the Harper government’s minister of natural resources, the point man on tar sands economics, until he succeeded Jim Flaherty as finance minister in 2014. Yet any rundown of this riding’s dynamics has to begin with a discussion of the recent shitshow on the Liberals’ side. The short version: in a wild mess, Eve Adams, the controversial Conservative MP for Mississauga-Brampton South, had tried and spectacularly failed to win her party’s nomination for the new riding of Oakville North-Burlington. So she and fiancé Dimitri Soudas – the PM’s former head of communications, who was fired from his job as Conservative Party of Canada executive director because of improper interference in the nomination – decamped to the Liberals. Leader Justin Trudeau was happy to receive the radioactive pair, and when Adams chose to run in Eglinton-Lawrence despite having no ties to the area, the riding’s loyal Liberals were, unsurprisingly, upset; they rallied around her opponent, lawyer Marco Mendocino. On July 26, he defeated Adams in a nomination meeting that received rare national attention.
For an election ostensibly being fought on the economy, finance minister Oliver has been weirdly absent. When Maclean’s went looking for him earlier this month, his campaign spokesperson said that he was just out canvassing the neighbourhood. Bloomberg News, however, discovered that he was actually attending a G20 meeting in Ankara, Turkey, which would have been much less remarkable had his team not lied about it. Canada’s finance minister is apparently being restrained from discussing Canada’s finances within Canada itself.
The NDP is running former Saskatchewan finance minister Andrew Thomson, who they repeatedly assure us is a star candidate. The Huffington Post called the race A Clash Of Finance Ministers; surely that’s the sort of headline the party was hoping for when they recruited the waterfront-dwelling Cisco executive.
