Random Access

What a short, strange trip it’s been, to misquote The Grateful Dead. (It goes without saying that there are a lot of Deadheads in politics.)
“For all intents and purposes, it has been a non-campaign,” says David Brown, the kind of level-headed, community-grounded candidate that any party would be glad to have on its roster.
“People have not been engaged,” says Brown, the Conservative candidate in Mississauga-Erindale, “ and when they have been engaged, it’s just been on the one issue.”
Unfortunately for candidate Brown and his leader, that issue was John Tory’s proposal to fully fund faith-based private schools, an issue that alienated the party’s core voters and handed Dalton McGuinty a pedestal on which to crow about how his party has strengthened public education.
Asked about how Tory’s religious conversion to a free vote on faith-based funding has gone down with the voters in the latter stages of the campaign, Brown says, “it’s generally been good. People are generally pleased that Mr. Tory has changed his stance. The concern is that there just is not enough time for it to make a difference. If it had happened a little sooner, we would be able to get back out and explain it more.”
It concerns Brown that the low voter turnout in advanced polls — despite being open for 12 hours a day for 10 days — will carry over until tomorrow. “The campaign has just been so flat. Not a lot of people seem to be paying a lot of attention.”
Ah yes, the old induce-coma-and-conquer strategy. Incumbent governments would love to patent that, if they could.
Ontario voters may not love Dalton McGuinty, but they respect him and they recognize that — tired as we are of hearing him the mantra that things were a lot worse in a lot of ways under Harris-Eves — it is essentially true. Especially in education, where former school teacher Harris seemed to want to exact revenge for every affront he’d ever suffered at the hands of the system. The result: endless rancour, warfare between the federations and the government and strikes that shut down schools.
The voters were looking for a reason not to support the status quo, but it doesn’t look like they were offered anything they found palatable.
The result of Tory’s faith-based proposal has been, “an overwhelming reaction at the doors in favour of our public education system,” says Nav Mangat, communications manager for Mississauga-Erindale Liberal candidate Harinder Takhar. “There was really not a lot of convincing to do,” says Mangat, a product of the public system. “Even in a city like Mississauga where we are so diverse, the majority of people are against it.”
Tory’s free vote recantation/amendment has not changed many minds either, Mangat says. “At the end of the day, the free vote does not change the position of the leader.”
Meanwhile, NDP/UTM candidate Shaila Kibria — whose reliance on the local student vote seems highly problematic given the history of political indifference of undergraduates to both student and general elections— says she is stealing lots of votes from Takhar Liberals who may have a sign on their front lawn but will register their own private protest vote.
The Shaila experience has been fun to watch. Boundless energy, unfortunately, does not necessarily transfer into electoral day success, however.
And there was one really sour note this week.
Kibria admits she was taken aback by an incident where someone scrawled a message on her campaign literature suggesting she is “a terrorist under the veil.”
“It did take the air out of me for a second,” says the 32-year-old mother of three. “I am so used to Mississauga not being racist.
“What you have to rememeber, though, is that for every racist remark we have to listen to, there’s an army of good people out there.”