Do we have an election race in Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston?

Jeff Green | Sep 09, 2015

With three parties locked in the national polls, the outcome of next month’s election is clearly in doubt.

Will the Conservatives pull out of their August slump and foment enough doubt in voters’ minds about the alternatives to return them to power? Will one of the other two parties pull ahead and put together their own alternative government?

These are all open questions at this point, and in addition it looks as if it will be in Ontario where the break will come. All of the other regions of the country seem to be headed in a clear direction, towards the Liberals in the Maritimes, the NDP in Quebec and BC and the Conservatives on the Prairies. Ontario is not so easy to read, except that the Liberals and NDP are strong in the urban ridings, the Conservatives in the rural ones, and suburban Toronto is a battleground.

What does all of this mean in a safe Conservative riding like the new Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston riding?

Even though the new riding has different boundaries from the riding that has easily elected Scott Reid four times, with numbers reaching easily into the over 50% range over the last two elections, there is some new territory this time around, north Kingston and Mississippi Mills in place of Lennox and Addington, but it is unclear that the new territory changed the prospects this time around. The North Kingston section of the riding has been part of a safe Liberal riding for many, many years, and Liberal candidate Phil Archambault (he is using Phil now to appeal to Anglophone voters) says that he has had a very good reception in that part of the riding. Another wild card is the home-town factor in Perth for John Fenik, who should do better in the town where he is the mayor than other NDP candidates normally do.

The hard numbers indicate, however, that it will take some significant moving on a regional, if not a national scale, to turn the local election into anything but an easy return for Scott Reid.

The most likely scenario for that to happen is a wholesale turn against Stephen Harper as leader of the country.

The Mike Duffy trial has opened up this possibility. Any one who thinks at all about what happened and what was said can only come to one or two obvious conclusions. Stephen Harper certainly knew that Mike Duffy lived in Ottawa when he named him the Senator for Prince Edward Islands; there can be no doubt of that since he saw Duffy all the time for years and years, in Ottawa. Whether he knew explicitly or implicitly where the money to pay Duffy back for the $90,000 re-payment came from, there is little doubt that he knew what was going on.

What he did was meant to fool the public in order to make an embarrassing situation go away.

If Justin Trudeau or Thomas Mulcair end up in a similar circumstance sometime in the future, do any of us think they would not do the same thing?

Not really, people and institutions tend to act in their own interest, and politics is made up of people and institutions.

The difference is that Trudeau and Mulcair have not yet been in that position and Harper has.

There tends to come a time when people stop having faith in the word of their leaders and when that time comes that leader, and that party, end up being tossed out of office, often in an ugly landslide.

Given that the polls have not yet shown enough to indicate this is happening among Canadian voters, taken as a whole, Scott Reid's seat is not yet at play.

For that to happen, Conservative support nationally would need to hit a free fall, and with the Duffy affair slipping into the background already, that is unlikely to happen.

However, and this is based only on very recent polls, there has been a movement from the Conservatives to the Liberals, especially in Ontario. If that solidifies and grows, there may be an argument for strategic voting among the anti-Conservative forces in the new LFK riding to coalesce around Philippe Archambault, but it is too early to think realistically in those terms.

(Editor's note – There is an all-candidates meeting, sponsored by the Frontenac News, scheduled for the Sydenham Legion Hall on Wednesday September 30 at 7:00 pm. As well, a meeting is set for Sharbot Lake on Monday, October 5, 7-9pm at Granite Ridge Education Centre, sponsored by: Teacher Federations (ETFO, OECTA, OSSTF), Retired Teachers Of Ontario)