Voters in Ontario cast their ballots Thursday in hotly contested election.
Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty is seeking a third consecutive majority but
faces stiff competition from Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives and Andrea
Horwath’s New Democrats.
Here’s a region-by-region look at ridings that will decide Ontario’s next
government.
GREATER TORONTO AREA
Peel Region west of Toronto, which includes the eight seats of Brampton and
Mississauga all held by Liberals, could have made the difference between a Tory
majority and minority.
But Mr. Hudak’s attacks on foreign workers and students may have backfired
here. The two ridings to watch are Mississauga
South, where a mid-campaign decision to scrap a gas-fired plant may
either save the seat for the Liberals or tip it into Tory hands.
Bramalea-Gore-Malton could turn out to be a three-way battle among
incumbent Liberal Kuldip Kular, Tory Sanjeev Maingi, and Jagmeet Singh, who came
within 600 votes of winning it for the NDP in May’s federal election.
Thornhill, north of Toronto, has swung back and forth between Tory
and Liberal in razor-thin races. This time around, it’s a battle between two
well-known men in the Jewish community. Bernie Farber, former head of the
Canadian Jewish Congress, is the Liberal candidate. Peter Shurman, the Tory
incumbent, won a tight contest against Liberal Mario Racco in the last election.
Federally, the riding is solidly Conservative.
Toronto itself seems solidly Liberal, but each opposition party has a chance
to pick up a few of the 23 seats in this region.
Pickering-Scarborough East and
Etobicoke-Lakeshore are must-wins for the Tories if they have any
hope of forming a majority.
Eglinton-Lawrence featuring two political street fighters: veteran
Liberal MPP Mike Colle against Tory Rocco Rossi, a novice at provincial politics
but a former mayoral candidate (and Liberal Party of Canada president).
The NDP look poised to turn their organizational advantage in Davenport
into a pick-up. And for the third time in four and a half years, York
South-Weston will feature Liberal incumbent Laura Albanese against
the NDP’s Paul Ferriera. The margins in their last two contests were 358 and 469
votes.
Burlington, west of the city, is traditionally Tory but the
Liberals think they have a good chance of winning because the incumbent, Joyce
Savoline, is not seeking re-election. Mr. McGuinty was in the riding earlier in
the campaign, to speak to volunteers at Liberal candidate Karmel Sakran’s
office. As well, the region is becoming more ethnically diverse, which Liberals
feel gives them an advantage.
So do the Tories. Mr. Hudak wrapped up his campaign Wednesday evening by
posing for a photo op at candidate Jane McKenna’s office. It was his second
visit to the riding.
SOUTHWESTERN ONTARIO
The one time safe Liberal seat of Windsor
West is up for grabs following the departure of Sandra Pupatello,
the former economic development minister who represented the riding for 16
years.
The Tories haven’t won a seat here since the 1960s, but with the popular Ms.
Pupatello out of the running, New Democrat candidate and local businessman Helmi
Charif has a fighting chance. All three party leaders have made campaign stops
riding. Mr. Charif is competing against Liberal candidate Teresa Piruzza, who
previously worked as a campaign manager for Ms. Pupatello.
London-Fanshawe is shaping up to be a three-way race. The Liberals
nabbed all four London area seats in 2007 – but incumbent Khalil Ramal won
London-Fanshawe by a slim margin.
Liberals are nervous about what happened in the federal election, when the
Conservatives won three London seats and the New Democrats took the fourth. Both
the Tories and the NDP are pouring a lot of resources in to the riding in the
hopes of making a big breakthrough.
The Liberal war room was quick to call attention to a radio interview Tory
candidate Cheryl Miller did with a local station on Wednesday, when she
said: “I knock on doors and people say, ‘I like you, but I don’t like your
leader,’ and that’s been really difficult for me.”
The rural riding of
Lambton–Kent–Middlesex is held by Liberal incumbent Maria Van
Bommel. But the Tories feel they have a strong chance of winning it. Mr.
McGuinty’s flagship Green Energy Act is controversial in the region because
it is leading to the development of wind turbines.
A small but vocal minority is fighting the wind farms. Protestors,
including one waving a sign reading, “Gadhafi, McGuinty: Dictactors with
Green Revolutions,” were outside the Gardenia Restaurant in Strathroy on
Wednesday when Mr. McGuinty made a brief campaign stop. Tory candidate Monte
McNaugton is fighting the wind farms, calling them the “greatest injustice”
of the Liberal government.
NORTHERN ONTARIO
There could be unprecedented turnover in the region’s 11 seats. The
Liberals have not delivered enough jobs to satisfy voters, and cabinet
ministers in Sudbury
(Rick Bartolucci) and Thunder
Bay-Superior North (Michael Gravelle) could be vulnerable, Mr.
Bartolucci to the NDP and Mr. Gravelle to both the Tories (running former
BlackBerry executive Anthony LeBlanc) and the NDP (running injured workers’
advocate Steve Mantis).
Ms. Horwath’s repeat visits may pay benefits for neighboring ridings in
the Sudbury media market, especially Liberal-held
Algoma-Manitoulin and Sault
Ste. Marie. Meanwhile, North Bay’s Vic Fedeli is well
positioned in
Nipissing and has a guaranteed seat at the cabinet table in any
Tory government
EASTERN ONTARIO
There are fewer seats here likely to change hands. The Tories have their
sights set on Liberal-held
Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry and
Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, largely rural ridings with
significant francophone populations that the federal Conservatives have
turned blue in recent elections.
Mark
Carleton-Mississippi Mills as a wildcard. The Tory candidate is
landowners’ rights activist Jack MacLaren, whose defeat of 34-year incumbent
Norm Sterling for the nomination prompted former PC Premier Ernie Eves to
complain of “Tea Party elements” within the party. The riding is a satellite
of Ottawa, and there may be enough of an urban, or urbane, population here
to yield a Liberal pick-up if the Tories are in free-fall.
And if the NDP surge is real, watch Ottawa
Centre, where hundreds of Parliament Hill staffers will try to
push Desmond Tutu-endorsed Anil Naidoo to victory over the industrious
Liberal incumbent, Yasir Naqvi.
The Ontario election is one no Ontario Father wants to take part in.
Not a single politician has gone to bat on the issue of a legal presumption of
equal parenting or reform of family law.
The Liberals and the conservatives have lost their cojonnes, they simply don't
have any, its all about winning political points, political popularity at the
expense of bad policy.
If you really feel like voting, please remember that the NDP is the party run by
extreme feminists who have an agenda of the destruction of any hetrosexual male
who happens to be a father. The NDP's goal is to eliminate fathers from the
lives of their children and that everyone should be in a same sex relationship.
Voters should remember how Jack Layton rose to power on a his policy of
promoting hatred towards men while he visited a brothel with a chinese sex slave
and lived in subsidized housing while pulling in six figures.
so, if you are a FATHER Don't vote, neither the Liberals or the Conservatives
give a dam about the legal rights of children.
If there was any brains in our politicians you would hear at least one of
them support the promotion of marriage between men and women, and the legal
rights of children to have a legal presumption of equal parenting.
Fact is, Ontario has Male Sharia law, concentration camps for fathers who want
to see their children and a Gestapo organization called the Family
Responsibility Office.
Our judiciary is riddled with extreme feminists who have a pathological hatred
towards men. The Appointment of Cheryl Robertson by Sheila Copps is just one
classic example of a judge with a record of leaving a trail of hatred and
destruction towards fathers as a result of her corrupt relationships.