June saw four national byelections in Canada and some provincial ones which I covered last month with several more happening at the end of July and beginning of August including one Federal seat in Calgary along with two Provincial byelections in Ontario, three in Saskatchewan and one more in Nova Scotia. As always I’ll make this a long one on the assumption that most Americans don’t know much about Canadian politics.
The previous MP (since 2017) was Bob Benzen, an obscure social conservative and anti-abortion backbencher whose only claim to fame was initiating the leadership review that toppled previous Tory Leader Erin O'Toole after he lost the last election in 2022. The current candidate was former Stephen Harper staffer Shuvaloy Majumdar who ran a campaign using such witty bon mots as mocking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for not campaigning in the riding because "there are no direct flights from Beijing to Calgary". Given that the election was widely considered a foregone conclusion the Liberals and NDP contented themselves with nominating obscure cannon fodder dudes with the Liberals going with the owner of a beach volleyball facility and the NDP going with a school teacher. The PPC nominated a fairly well known (in the party at least) activist and former candidate while the Greens were not considered a factor although they did have the coolest name in Ravenmoon Crocker.
CALGARY-HERITAGE RESULTS (turnout 29%);
Conservatives - Shuvaloy Majumdar - 15,803 (65%)
Liberals - Elliot Wienstein - 3,463 (14%)
NDP - Gurmit Bhachu - 3,425 (14%)
PPC - Kelly Lorencz - 649 (3%)
Greens - Ravenmoon Crocker - 416 (2%)
The Conservatives increased their vote percentage for only the second time in this year's byelections while all the other parties dropped a few points. The Liberals dropped a point less than the NDP allowing them to edge out the NDP who finished second last time. Meanwhile the PPC continues their slide into electoral irrelevance. After the results were in the winning Tory boasted that they "Had sent a powerful message to Trudeau" but nobody actually thinks a sweeping Tory win in this riding shows any wider trends.
ONTARIO;
Two Provincial byelections were called for vacancies, with one in Scarborough-Guildwood, a Toronto inner suburb and Kanata-Carleton, an outer Ottawa suburb.
SCARBOROUGH-GUILDWOOD;
This suburban Toronto riding became vacant when Liberal MLA Mitzi Hunter resigned to run for Toronto Mayor in June only to finish with a humiliating 2% compared to the winning Olivia Chow of the NDP. Hunter had held the seat since 2013 having served in Cabinet and had previously run for the party leadership. This had been a Liberal riding since it was created out of parts of other ridings in 2003 although elections have always been competitive so it's a somewhat but not exactly a solidly safe Liberal riding. The Liberals are currently at a distant third place in the Provincial Legislature with a dismal eight seats while the ruling Tories have a majority government with eighty three seats and the NDP at thirty one. The Liberals nominated Andrea Hazell, President of the Scarborough Business Association and a Caribbean philanthropic organization and like Hunter a black woman of Caribbean heritage. The ruling Tories made a serious run recruiting Gary Crawford, a City Councilor since 2010. Considered a moderate, Crawford was an ally of outgoing Mayor John Tory but he had previously occasionally clashed with Rob Ford, former Mayor and brother of current Tory Premier Doug Ford. The NDP nominated Thadsha Navaneethan a community organizer, worker in various non-profits and a former Tamil refugee. Like most Scarborough ridings this is an ethnically diverse riding with Crawford being the only white major candidate and having represented only a part of the riding as Councilor. While at the Federal level the Tories have been challenged by the right wing People's Party at the Provincial level the Tories have been blissfully unaffected by such a challenge until more recently as fallout from COVID and the so-called Truckers Convoy has led to attempts to create a party for right wing extremists, conspiracists and antivaxxers in the form of the New Blue Party (note in Canada the party colours are the reverse of those in America with the Tories being blue and Liberals red since the 19th century and the NDP in orange) although the fractious right also immediately coughed up another party as the charmingly named Stop The New Sex-Ed Agenda (guess what they're upset about) while for old school racists there was veteran Neo Nazi leader and frequent candidate Paul Fromm. The Greens (who hold one seat but have never come close to winning here) nominated water engineer and autism activist Tara McMahon. As it's not that hard to get on the ballot (I once ran for the Greens) perennial candidates are a Toronto tradition and besides the odious Fromm there was John "The Engineer" Turmel (he always bills himself that way) who has run in every election since 1979 as a self described "Social Credit Libertarian" in various Provinces rarely attracting triple digits although he has gotten recognized in the Guinness Book Of World Records for the most unsuccessful races with a 106 runs thus far. Also on the bill was Kevin Clarke who those with sharp memories may note had just finished running for Mayor. Clarke is a sometimes homeless man who has run in every election since the 1990's with his campaign essentially consisting of wandering around wearing a sandwich board and using chalk to scrawl "K Clarke For Mayor" on sidewalks. Full disclosure I actually had Clarke run against me when I ran for the Greens back in the 90's and once he called me up and without warning he put me on a confrence call then made a prank call to the Liberal MP. So that was fun.
Heading into closing stretch the veteran Crawford was considered a strong candidate with an excellent chance of winning with the Tories throwing a full court press and the endorsement of outgoing Mayor John Tory compared to the lesser known Hazell especially given the Liberals currently lacking a leader and Hunter's pathetic showing in the Mayor's race while the NDP were cautiously optimistic after Chow's Mayoral victory. One question concerning the Tories was whether the New Blue and Anti Sex-Ed (I refuse to type that full name in again) would act as spoilers.
SCARBOROUGH-GUILDWOOD RESULTS (turnout 22%);
Liberals - Andrea Hazell - 5,640 - 37%
Conservatives - Gary Crawford - 4,526 - 30%
NDP - Thadsha Navaneethan - 4,041 - 26%
Anti-Sex-Ed - Tony Walton - 508 - 3%
New Blue - Danielle Height - 151 - 1%
Greens - Tara McMahon - 146 - 1%
Among the other six also rans Neo Nazi Fromm got 66 votes, only nine more than Clarke who probably doesn't even live in the riding while Turmel continued his tradition of finishing last with 22 votes.
The results were an obvious relief for the Liberals who many pundits had counted out while Crawford's loss was considered a slap in the face to Ford's Tories (as well as John Tory) rather than a strictly personal one for Crawford who, like Mitzi Hunter also resigned his seat to run and lost although Crawford actually got twice as many votes when he won in the last Municipal election. In fact if he had gotten the same number of votes this time he would have easily won. The Liberal vote in fact declined by ten points since the previous election however almost all of the vote seems to have gone to the NDP who gained nine points and were pleased with the results with their close third place finish. The Greens also dropped two points finishing behind the two right wing parties whose combined vote did not end up spoiling the Tory vote even assuming that if they had not been on the ballot their voters would have backed the moderate Crawford which is hardly a given. In fact the having the Anti-Sex-Ed party edge out the New Blue (who at least have pretentions to being a real party) is an embarrassment for their ambitions to challenge the Tories. The voter turnout of 22% was low even by byelection standards although much of this was blamed on it being summer and the election having comparatively low stakes however the turnout rate in the last Provincial and previous two Mayoral elections was also low. In both cases the opposition was considered weak and the results a forgone conclusion and seemed to benefit Ford and then Mayor John Tory and there's no reason to suggest a higher turnout next time would be in Ford's favour.
KANATA-CARLETON;
On the outskirts of Ottawa this riding is a mix of commuter exurbs, small towns and farm land and includes the Ottawa Senators hockey arena. Considered a fairly safe Tory riding it has in fact been in Tory hands in every election since 1871 with the exception of 1919 although it has been reasonably competitive and the Liberals have won it at the Federal level. Sitting Tory MLA Merrilee Fullerton resigned after a disastrous tenure in different cabinet posts including Islamophobic posts, cuts to education and autism care and criticism for a slow response to COVID. The Tories nominated businessman Sean Webster and assumed an easy victory until the leaderless Liberals recruited Karen McCrimmon, an airforce vet and Federal MP who had represented the riding from 2015 to 2021. The NDP (who had finished second in the previous election) nominated Melissa Coenraad, President of the local healthcare workers union while the New Blue Party nominated a candidate along with the Greens. No Anti-Sex-Ed party this time though. While the Tories had been confident when the election was called the nomination of the popular McCrimmon threw the election into doubt and even the Tories would admit the possibility of an upset.
KANATA-CARLETON RESULTS (turnout 35%);
Liberals - Karen McCrimmon - 11,066 - 34%
Conservatives - Sean Webster - 10,415 - 32%
NDP - Melissa Coenraad - 9,560 - 30%
New Blue - Jennifer Boudreau - 638 - 2%
Greens - Steven Warren - 442 - 1%
The Liberals increased their previous vote percentage by eleven points at the expense of the Tories for another embarrassment while the NDP, in spite of dropping from second to third place actually also raised their percentage by five points at the expense of the Greens and could once again consider themselves reasonably pleased.
The final results of both elections were an obvious black eye for the Tories although they were able to rationalize their Kanata-Carleton loss as due to the local popularity of McCrimmon. It's harder for them to excuse Crawford's loss in Scarborough though where they had their own strong local candidate. They also can hardly point to increased vote percentage in Scarborough without admitting that this was almost certainly due to Crawford's local brand rather than the party's. The Liberals were the obvious winners in both but it's hard to know what if any wider trends there might be here as their vote percentage actually dropped in Scarborough while the NDP's vote went up in both even while also coming in third in both. The NDP's larger vote is actually potentially helpful to the Tories in winning three way races assuming they take these votes from the Liberals as was clearly the case in Scarborough although not in Kanata where they took votes from the Greens. As for the Greens they lost votes in both but they were never considered a factor in either riding anyway. Speaking of not being a factor, the far right New Blue Party's dismal showing is even more abortive than the People's Party's national ambitions have been allowing the Ford Tories to ignore them and not have to worry about shoring up their right flank unlike the Federal Tories. The crucial difference between the Federal and Ontario Conservatives is that while Federal Leader Pierre Poilievre has been happy to play footsie with far right extremists, anti-vaxxers, homophobes, China haters and conspiracists in order to fend off the People's Party Ford has largely avoided the far right and has been openly contemptuous of antivaxxers although he is perfectly happy to get in bed with blatantly corrupt real estate developers. One big reason may be that unlike the Federal Tories the Ontario party actually does fairly well in suburban ridings which both of these were. In fact Ford himself represents a suburban Toronto riding in Etobicoke. Mind you Pierre Poilievre also represents a suburban riding outside Ottawa and is considered a brilliant political mind, especially by Pierre Poilievre, compared to the loutish Ford, so time will tell who was right.
SASKATCHEWAN;
A rural farming and oil producing prairie province that has been ruled by the Saskatchewan Party (essentially a renamed version of the Conservative Party formed after the official scandal ridden Tory party was destroyed in the nineties) with the NDP as opposition. Saskatchewan is historically central to the history of the NDP who formed the first social democratic government in North America (aside from various local governments) from 1944 to 1964 bringing in the continent's first Medicare system but the Sask Party has ruled comfortably since 2007 with majority governments as the discovery of oil transformed the economy from farming, rather like that of similar states like Oklahoma or Montana. The Liberals last held power here in the 1960's but were wiped out in the 90's and have been essentially moribund since getting fewer votes than even the Greens with a corporal's guard recently attempting a rebrand under the name the Progress Party announced this summer. Thus leaving Saskatchewan only the second province to not have a Liberal Party with the first being British Columbia whose Liberal Party changed their name to BC United also this year. Normally the Sask Party scores easy wins in rural ridings and some suburban ridings in the two sizable cities of Regina and Saskatoon while the NDP wins the bulk of the urban ridings with some strength in the sparsely populated far north which is heavily native. The ruling Sask Party under Premier Scott Moe currently hold 48 of the 61 seats with the NDP holding the rest. The Sask Party have run a typical Western Canadian Tory government, cutting taxes, promising (and failing) to balance the budget, denying climate change and ginning up and exploiting resentment and aggrievement towards Ottawa and the Liberals and NDP for successive elections. Moe has been criticized for his bumbling of the COVID crisis at times taking it seriously and at other times declaring it over only to have another surge. He both supported vaccines early on only to later question them and he eventually endorsed the so-called Truckers Convoy. As a measure of the Sask Party's dominance in 2020 it was revealed that Moe had killed a woman in a car crash back in 1997 and had been charged in previous DUI incidents which would have ended his career anywhere else but he still managed to win reelection easily losing only a few seats. Conservative dominance is so total that the Federal Tories have won every riding except for one in Regina, usually by huge margins. Like Ontario, Saskatchewan has no shortage of feuding far right parties vying for the populist vote with one group of Sask Party dissidents calling itself Saskatchewan United. Then there's the Buffalo Party calling for the province to separate from Canada (along with Alberta) to form it's own petrostate. As an oddity there is also the skeleton crew remaining from the old Conservative Party that held on to the legal rights and remaining assets to the Conservative name since the nineties and continues to run token candidates. They actually do show up in the polls but this is largely seen as low information voters thinking they are actually the Federal Tories, some annoyed Sask voters making a protest and perhaps a handful of octogenarians who think 1960's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker is still alive, but they never show up on election day. Moe does not face reelection until 2024 but had to fill three vacancies, all in Sask Party held ridings with two swing ridings in the capital of Regina and another in a central rural riding. He stalled calling them as long as possible leaving them until late summer which is unusual for a rural province as voter turnout is usually quite low during this time although it does provide a handy excuse if the Sask Party loses.
REGINA-CORONATION PARK;
This capital city riding had been held since 2011 by Mark Docherty who served as Speaker in the Legislature from 2018 to 2020 but was defeated for a second bid for the Speakers chair and eventually resigned. Still popular locally he left on bitter terms trashing the Sask government on his way out and saying he couldn't think of anything positive that had been done for the riding. Before 2011 this had been a NDP riding going back to 1986, usually by comfortable ridings and this is the sort of riding the NDP must win back if they are ever to return to power. The riding has a large Pakistani community and both main parties candidates came from that community with the NDP nominating Noor Burki, who runs a driving school, not the normal occupation for a politician, while the Sask Party nominated Riaz Ahmad, owner of an accounting firm. The rebranded ex-Liberal now Progress Party also chose to make their first stand here for whatever that's worth (not much) with the main question for them being whether they can finish ahead of the Greens who have never been a factor in this very conservative province dominated by fossil fuel but who had still managed to surpass the moribund Liberals in the 2010's.
REGINA-CORONATION PARK RESULTS (turnout 29%);
NDP - Noor Burki - 2,039 - 57%
Sask - Riaz Ahmad - 1,131 - 31%
Progressive Conservatives - Olasehine Ben Adebayo - 222 - 6%
Green - Kendra Anderson - 122 - 3%
Progress - Reid Hill - 85 - 2.36
A crushing NDP victory in which they gained over twelve points while the Sask Party lost over seventeen points. The fact that the two of those points went to the Progressive Conservatives who are essentially an irrelevant paper party for disgruntled Sask Party voters to park their votes, suggests even Tory voters, at least in Regina, are not happy with the Sask Party. Meanwhile the rebranded Progress Party/Liberals could not be more irrelevant. So far the evidence in both BC (where the renamed BC United were just crushed in two byelections) and Saskatchewan this year suggests that while conservatives may be willing to accept a rebrand Liberals are not. The voter turnout rate here was quite low and while this is often seen as benefitting incumbent parties it certainly did not here.
REGINA-WALSH ACRES;
A neighbouring riding became vacant after the death of Sask Party rookie incumbent Derek Meyers from cancer at the young age of 45. The riding had been won by the Sask Party since 2011 but had been previously held by the NDP since 1967 with one win each by the Conservatives (1982) and the Liberals (1994) and it's another must win riding for the NDP if they are to make a comeback. The NDP nominated school teacher Jared Clarke while the Sask Party recruited a high profile candidate in retired NHL Hockey player Neven Markwark. The Progress Party did not bother to run here.
REGINA-WALSH ACRES RESULTS (turnout 38%);
NDP - Jared Clarke - 2,395 - 54%
Sask - Nevin Markwart - 1,783 - 40%
Progressive Conservatives - 215 - 5%
Green - Joseph Reynolds - 38 - 1%
Another easy win for the NDP who gained sixteen points while the Sask party dropped only six points this time suggesting Markwark's relative local celebrity helped him a bit.
LUMSDEN-MORSE;
This rural riding of farms and small towns is a typical safe Sask riding which they or under a different name the previous Tories have held since 1978 aside from the Liberals winning it once in 1995 and while nobody expected the NDP to win it the two rival far right parties did make a play here. Previous MLA Lyle Stewart had held the seat since 1999 and served in various cabinet posts but he got into a completely self inflicted and pointless scandal involving previous MLA and easily the most notorious politician in the history of Saskatchewan if not all of Canada, Colin Thatcher.
Thatcher is the son of Ross Thatcher, Liberal Premier from 1964-1971 and the last Liberal to hold the office. Ross was defeated in 1971 and died less than a month later and Colin was elected as a Liberal (in a different riding) in 1975. However the Sask Liberals were clearly in decline and Colin also held a grudge against the Liberals who he blamed for abandoning his father after his loss (nobody else remembers it that way) and he soon crossed the floor and joined the Conservatives serving briefly in Cabinet in 1982. However Colin Thatcher has a very dark side. Known as a hot tempered bully who abused and cheated on his wife Joanne who filed for divorce in 1980. Years of very public and nasty court proceedings followed and in 1981 a sniper shot and wounded Joanne in her kitchen. No arrests were ever made and the case was never solved so amazingly Tory Premier Grant Devine still saw fit to appoint Colin to his cabinet in 1982. That went about as well as could be expected and the famously arrogant and abrasive Thatcher only lasted a little over a year when he suddenly resigned citing family reasons. Four days later Joanne was found bludgeoned and shot to death in her home. This time Colin was arrested after a year long investigation and convicted of murder. The Thatcher case was the subject of a best selling book and a popular 1989 CBC TV movie "Love And Hate" (starring Kenneth Welsh and Kate Nelligan) which won a number of awards. Thatcher was paroled in in 2007 still protesting his innocence and wrote a book "Anatomy Of A Frame" alleging he was framed by a cabal including the police, Crown Attorneys, the Liberals and NDP (neither of whom were actually in power during his crimes), Joanne's family and of course the media and CBC and needless to say without ever showing an ounce of remorse. So far this is merely a forty year old horrific scandal merely involving Thatcher himself with no suggestions that it ever involved the Grant Devine Tory Government which already had so many other scandals that other officials actually went to prison for corruption and the party was swept out in 1991 being so unpopular that they ended up changing their name to the existing Sask Party. MLA Lyle Stewart had actually started out as Thatcher's executive assistant until his 1982 resignation and Stewart had to sit in the penalty box for a while twice running for nominations and losing until finally getting the nod in 1999 and there is no reason any of Thatcher's stink would still be sticking to him but in October of 2022 he invited Thatcher, on parole since 2007 and still loudly unrepentant, to the Speech From The Throne like an evil Jacob Marley as his personal guest and calling him a friend. In the resulting uproar Stewart found himself swiftly bounced out of Cabinet and four months later announced his retirement citing "health reasons" thus setting up this byelection which Scott Moe scheduled for the same day as the potentially more dicey Regina ridings presumably hoping a likely win in this safe riding would distract from potentially embarrassing possible loses in the two Regina ridings.
The Sask Party nominated Blaine McLoed, a dairy farmer and director of director of the Dairy Farmers of Canada involved in local politics, an obvious candidate for a rural riding. The NDP have not been seen as a major factor here in living memory running university student Kaitlyn Stadnyk but a more serious threat being posed by the new right wing populist Sask United Party running oil executive Jon Hromek who ran an anti tax campaign as well as calling for the defunding and banning from schools of Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile the Buffalo Party, a far right Western separatist which calls for the dissolution of Canada and had gotten an outsized amount of hand wringing media attention also put up a candidate.
LUMSDEN-MORSE RESULTS (37%);
Sask - Blaine McLeod - 2,648 - 54%
Sask United - Jon Hromek - 1,121 - 23%
NDP - Kaitlyn Stadnyk - 1, 064 - 22%
Buffalo - Les Guillerman - 56 - 1%
Green - Isaiah Hunter - 38 - 1%
Sask United won easily enough but as a worrying sign dropped twenty points most of which obviously went to Sask United while even the despised NDP gained four points. If the Sask United Party's support against an strong local candidate holds steady this could cost the Sask Party seats on some more marginal semi-rural ridings if not to them but to the NDP via vote splitting. Meanwhile the far right extremists Buffalo Party also dropped five points and didn't even bother to run in the two Regina ridings which is a positive sign for literally everybody but doesn't actually benefit the Sask Party if those votes simply go to Sask United as was clearly the case.
After the results it was hard for the Sask Party to spin these results as anything other than an embarrassment and a potential warning sign for the next election. The route to victory for the NDP is narrow requiring them to basically sweep their traditional urban ridings in Regina and Saskatoon along with the couple far northern ridings along with possibly a few marginal ridings like Prince Albert and Moose Jaw that have a mix of a small city and rural for which a strong showing for Sask United splitting the votes would be helpful while at the same time the Liberal/Progress Party remains too irrelevant to cost them any votes. This is almost a copy of how the NDP won in neighbouring and similar Alberta in 2015 and it requires things to go their way that are out of the NDP's control but the results of these byelections suggest that it's possible.
NOVA SCOTIA;
While the byelections in Ontario and Saskatchewan were seen as important enough to merit some national press attention another byelection in a smaller province which got less attention may have larger national implications. Nova Scotia is one of the four Atlantic Provinces residing north of the Upper New England States and demographically most resembling Maine; largely white, small town and older but still with a solid base of traditional Liberal Party support. Nova Scotia has had a Tory government since Tim Houston won an upset win in 2021 with thirty one seats to the incumbent Liberals seventeen and the NDP's six for the first time since 2006. Since then Houston's poll numbers have remained reasonably solid. Politics in the Atlantic Provinces tends to be rather less ideological and more based on personalities and traditional party loyalties (except in New Brunswick where divisions between English and French have made things more divisive) and all four major parties (Tories, Liberals, NDP and Greens) tend to be more-or-less centrist.
The riding of Preston is an oddity in being perhaps the only black majority riding in the country. However unlike in America or the UK where most black majority districts are urban, Preston is a small town and rural riding near the capital Halifax where the inhabitants are the descendants of the original Black Loyalists who fought for the British in the American Revolution and then had to flee to Canada. They were later joined by some Underground Railroad escaped slaves and Caribbean immigrants but the bulk of this community is quite proud of their pre-Confederation Loyalist roots. The riding has been Liberal for the last twenty years although competitive and both the Tories and NDP have won it in the past. Previous Liberal MLA Angela Simmons had only been in office since 2021 but had served as Deputy Speaker, the first black person to do so. After the Liberals loss she made a run for party leader but lost and promptly stepped down.
The Liberals nominated Carlo Simmons (unrelated to Angela), owner of a paving company and church pastor. The Tories nominated Twila Grosse a retiree who had served on the Board for the Black Cultural Centre. The NDP went with basketball coach Colter Simmonds who finished third in the previous election. There is also the by now obligatory populist antivax party in Nova Scotia United. As in previous elections all the main party candidates are black.
With no burning issues or larger scandals the race would have probably been fought on the personalities of local candidates and local issues with both the Liberals and NDP opposing a local dumpsite but the Tories cynically decided to make the byelection a referendum on the national carbon tax. The Liberals and NDP bitterly complained that this was a distraction and not a provincial issue which they had any say over at all. They even complained to the provinces Electoral Commission that the Tories ads and signs calling for people to vote no on the "Trudeau/Singh Carbon Tax" were misleading only to have the Commission rule in the Tories' favour. To add insult to injury the Tories also filed a complaint of their own about the anti-dump signs the Liberals and NDP were running on the grounds that the dump was a purely local and not provincial issue which the Commission then blandly contradicted their other ruling to agree with ordering them to take down their signs which the furious Liberals refused to comply with. In the end in was clear the Tories anti carbon tax campaign was working.
NOVA SCOTIA-PRESTON RESULTS (turnout 39%);
Tories - Twila Grosse - 1,950 - 45%
NDP - Colter Simmonds - 1,145 - 27%
Liberals - Carlo Simmons - 1,021 - 24%
Green - Anthony Edmonds - 101 - 2%
Nova Scotia United - Bobby Taylor - 95 - 2%
The results were an obvious humiliating defeat for the Liberals who dropped twenty points and finished third. But while in such a small riding there may have been issues with the local candidates (Simmons does not seem like a typical Liberal candidate) there is no doubt from observers that the Tories anti carbon tax campaign was a successful and has national implications for the next elections. The Federal Tories are heavily based in the petrostates of Alberta and Saskatchewan and have been happy to curry favour with anti carbon taxers, climate deniers and conspiracy theorists for decades but Nova Scotia is no petrostate and not traditionally hostile to green policies so if such a campaign, however cynical and dishonest, can succeed here there will be a obvious temptation for Pierre Poilievre and the Federal Tories run a this as a national campaign, something they would love to do anyway. If the Liberals, NDP and Greens have an answer for this line of attack they had better start working on it.
The next major election in Canada will be the Provincial election in Manitoba in October where the unpopular Tory government is running for a third term as well as one to replace the above mentioned Gary Crawford who resigned from Toronto City Council to run and lose for a Provincial seat and I'll check back then.