Random Access

Hugh Arrison admitted last night — after he won the Mississauga South nomination for the Conservative Party — that it has been a frustrating, tortuous trail to the candidate's seat.
"There was a point there where we were all questioning ourselves," about staying in the race, the personable international financial consultant said in an interview at St. John's Anapilis Hall after he took the victory. His party certainly couldn;t have been said to have welcomed him with open arms.
Raya Shadursky, the Orchard Heights ratepayers' president who gave the best speech of the night by some distance, reminded the audience of some 500 people that she first filed her intent to seek the job in Oct. 2006. She noted that some babies who were born in the interim are probably walking and talking by now.
"Every candidate was questioning why we were in the race," Arrison recalled after the party made them all resubmit their credentials, then stalled the nomination call, despite several requests from the local executive.
The party was obviously waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Designated Celebrity to magically appear from the wings to sweep the delegates off their feet, one must presume.
Major Ted Opitz was the next-closest thing. But he faced an uphill battle with the locals from Mississauga South — where residency seems to matter more than it does in the rest of the City and the country — because he came from out-of-riding.
The image would have been perfect for his detractors if he had been a paratrooper, and could have been popped in, complete with political parachute in hand. As it was, they made quite enough hay simply from the fact he didn't live here.
Voters used the preferential ballot system, where you rank your first, second and third choices for election at the same time on the single ballot. If no one has a 50 per cent plus one majority on that vote, the votes of the third-place finisher's supporters are set aside.
That candidate's supporters second choices are then used to determine the winner. They are redistributed between the remaining candidates to determine the ultimate victor.
Rumour has it that Arrison didn't get a clean win on the first tally, but managed to go over the top with the second count.
He wasn't particularly worrying about how he did it in the first flush of victory.
It might have been tempting to pull out when it seems the deck is stacked against you, Arrison said but, "when you become a candidate you discover that people are counting on you. You've got a lot of people relying on you. There were many times we we were discouraged by the length of time it took and then, of course, they bring in someone else," he said in reference to the Major.
With the lack of success the Conservative Party, provincial and federal, has experienced in trying to massage the results of nominations in Mississauga South, you'd think they might cotton on to the fact that there is a real grassroots tuned-in membership extant, who aren't going to be cowed by Party Central.
Arrison knows how tough a row he has to hoe in order to beat incumbent Szabo.
Asked what he must do to win, he got right to the heart of the matter: "We have to get into the homes of our Liberal buddies and get them to chance their minds."
An earlier nomination might have helped with that strategy.