Does your vote count? Depends where you live

Jeff Green | Sep 06, 2019

A tale of two ridings

There was a cartoon in one of the Toronto newspapers last week, maybe it was the Toronto Star. It featured someone in shorts walking in the sun next to a building, holding an ice cream.  But the building was coming to a corner, and in the shadow of the building the leaders of the 4 major national political parties were standing. The caption said something like, enjoy the last bit of the summer because look what lurks in the fall, the federal election.

Well, Labour Day has now come and gone and we can’t avoid it any more. An election is looming, and for us in Lanark and Frontenac County, that means there will be a winner and a race for second place because, once again, we live in a secure Conservative riding. For our readers on Hwy. 41, check your municipal tax bill. If it says Frontenac anywhere on it, you are in the same boat, but if you live in Lennox and Addington County you live in potential swing riding. I say potential because there has only been one election the Hastings-Lennox and Addington riding, which was created for the 2015 election, and it was won by the Liberal candidate, Mike Bossio. The former Prince Edward Hastings riding, of which Hastings County was the largest component, was a true swing riding, electing representatives from the party in power between 1988 and 2015. Mike Bossio’s re-election hopes, therefore, are tightly bound to the popularity of Justin Trudeau. If Canadians decide that Andrew Scheer is not to their liking at all, it won’t make any difference to Scott Reid’s chances of being re-elected on October 21.

This paper will reach 12,301 households through Canada Post. Of those, about 1,200, those in Addington Highlands, will have the opportunity to cast a vote that just might help determine how we are governed over the next four years. The other 90% will not. This, despite the fact that Justin Trudeau sincerely promised in 2015 that if elected his party would deliver, an electoral reform package that would be in place before the 2019 election. He said that no Canadian would ever again be asked to vote in an election where their vote does not have a direct impact on the result.

The Trudeau government did not only fail to deliver on this promise, in time for the current election, they backed off electoral reform completely. As long as he is the leader of the party, there will be no electoral reform. The Liberals made this reversal quite early in their mandate, calculating that by the time the 2019 election rolls around, it will not matter because it will be ancient history. And it seems as if they were right in that assessment.

The parties are certainly engaged in a shadow war these days as they try to control the narrative going into the election, but electoral reform is not one of the contenders. The SNC Lavalin fiasco is what the Conservative Party wants as the election question, and at least for Ontario, the Liberals want people to be thinking about Doug Ford. The NDP? We don’t know what they want us to be thinking about. The Green Party is unique among the four of them, in that they know exactly what they want voters to be thinking about when they go to the polls, climate change. The Green’s do not need to change their message as the election unfolds. The other three parties, will be constantly reacting to polling data, headlines and trends on twitter and the like. The Greens, if they are smart, won’t do any of that, but will hammer the same message home throughout the campaign.

Fortunately for all of our readers, whose vote will not have any literal impact on the outcome, election campaigns are not only about the vote itself. They also provide a focus for a national conversation that we can participate in if we choose to. And in the end, elections end up being decided more by a wave of public support for one party or another than by the results in a single riding. We may not have a vote that counts, but we are like fish in a school, birds in a flock, or cattle in a herd, we are part of the movement in one direction or another.

It makes a difference if Scott Reid receives less or more than 50% of the vote (he received 47% in 2015, the first time the LFK riding was contested, in the context of collapsing support for the Conservative Party. The Conservative vote dropped by almost 10% in Ontario in that election, from 44.4% in 2011 to 35% in 2015.

If Reid’s vote jumps over 50% this time, it will mean something. Similarly, the Liberal Party candidate Kayley Kennedy, if she can keep the Liberal vote to above the 30% mark it would signal that the Liberals may keep many of the seats in Ontario that propelled them to forming a majority government in 2015. In 2015, the Liberal candidate, Philippe Archambault, received 37.6%, picking up support from the NDP, whose candidate, Perth Mayor John Fenik, received only 14% of the vote as NDP fortunes slid in Ontario as a whole (they were at 16.6%, down from 25.6% under Jack Layton in 2011).  

The NDP have not selected a candidate in Lanark Frontenac Kingston as of this week, which is not a good sign for them. Not having a candidate before Labour Day is probably alright, but they should have put someone in place by this week, in my view. There was an announcement last week that Satinka Schilling, from Perth, had been approved to contest the nomination, and a formal meeting date should follow in short order, but nothing has been announced.

Finally, Green Party candidate Anita Payne received 3.4% of the vote in the riding in 2015. This time around, the Greens nominated Stephen Kotze in May, and he has been campaigning all summer, as has Liberal candidate Kayley Kennedy. Scott Reid has not necessarily been campaigning to any great extent, but as the sitting MP, he has kept up a normal schedule of public appearances at events throughout the summer. Both the Liberals and Greens could gain from a further erosion of the NDP vote, should the party not find a way to attract some positive attention to their Ontario campaign.

By contract, in Hastings Lennox and Addington, the goal for both the Liberals and the Conservatives is to win the seat.

Liberal incumbent Mike Bossio has engaged in a campaign that really never stopped over the past four years. He has also brought money with him more often than not, whether he came to Napanee, Belleville, or Bancroft, another signal that the Liberal Party knows this is a bell weather riding. The Conservative Party had their candidate, lawyer Derek Sloan from Stirling, in place before the end of last year. He won a contested nomination over three other candidates, signaling that the Conservative Party also realises that they need to win rural Ontario ridings if they are hoping to win the election next month. The NDP have not nominated a candidate in Hastings Lennox and Addington as of this writing, and neither has the Green Party.

For context, the race last time was extremely close, a differential of 225, the sixth closest race among the 338 seats that were contested across the county. Both candidates garnered 42% of the popular vote, the NDP were at 13% and the Greens at 3%. In Hastings, Lennox & Addington, every vote really does count.

Apart from whatever profile Mike Bossio has been able to establish over the last four years, the fortunes of the Liberal and Conservative Parties in Ontario as a whole will play a major role in Hastings Lennox and Addington.

In 2015 the Liberal Party received 45% of the vote in Ontario and the Conservative Party 35%. Opinion polls have been volatile in recent weeks, with some showing the Liberals ahead of the Conservative Party in Ontario by as much as 6% points, and some showing a neck and neck race. The NDP vote plays into it as well, both locally and provincially. The NDP vote in HL&A was lower than the Ontario percentage last time around, and in this election Liberal campaigners in the riding will undoubtedly be trying to convince traditional NDP voters to be strategic and vote against the Conservatives party b by supporting Mike Bossio.

The non-campaign by both the Greens and the NDP in the riding this summer, which is extending into September, is good news for the Bossio team.  As well, in the 2015 election, the Conservative Party candidate was Daryl Kramp, the incumbent from the former Prince Edward Hastings riding. Kramp ran provincially in 2018 and now represents the riding at Queen’s Park.

Derek Sloan, a political newcomer, does not have Daryl Kramp’s name recognition, which might hurt him in Hastings County, but Kramp will certainly be lending Sloan his support.  All of these factors, and Bossio’s happy political warrior persona, will make HFL&A a riding to watch during the campaign.

If the federal Liberal campaign falters, which is certainly a possibility, they will lose this riding as NDP and Green supporters drift away. I doubt if the Conservative vote is as volatile in this riding. Eastern Ontario Conservatives don’t tend to budge much when it comes to casting ballots.

That is the reality of our system. We have ridings where we are like fish or farm animals and other ridings where our votes can influence the shape of the government of an entire nation.