[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s 905 suburbs turning into race between Tories and Liberals"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Campbell Clark writes about how, in Toronto's suburbs, the NDP is dropping out of contention.

A lot of this election has already been decided in Toronto’s suburbs. A lot of it remains to be decided there, too.

The so-called 905 is where the Orange Wave crested, the place where Thomas Mulcair’s NDP needed to make inroads if it wanted to keep climbing into a clear lead, but didn’t. It’s where Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have rebounded. And it’s where Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have proved resilient.

It is now a region with a mostly two-horse race between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And a small shift, perhaps 5 per cent of voters, can have a big impact on who wins the national election, flipping 30 or 40 seats one way or the other. In election math, that’s like sweeping Alberta or British Columbia. In 2011, Stephen Harper won a majority by winning the 905.

There are other places with potential to alter the national race, of course, notably in British Columbia’s three-party dynamic and in Quebec, where an NDP slip could resuscitate the Bloc Québécois and revive the Conservatives. But even before the NDP slid in Quebec, its hopes faltered in Toronto’s suburbs.

In August, as the campaign began, the New Democrats were riding high in national polls and still targeting breakthroughs in the 905, notably in “inner” suburbs of Mississauga and Brampton just west of Toronto’s city limits – areas where they surged in the 2011 campaign. Mr. Mulcair made early campaign stops in those places. But now, as October begins, their real hope for a gain in the west side of the 905 is in one riding, Brampton-East.

“For a while there, the NDP was in the race in the 905, but they’ve dropped off significantly,” said pollster and political strategist Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group. In the GTA suburbs, the NDP fell from from 32 per cent just before the campaign to 16 per cent in late September, according to his firm’s surveys.