Rural Eastern Ontario ridings

I miss the riding of Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington because it returned Liberals in all federal and provincial elections in which it existed as a riding from 1993 onwards. In 1988 the Liberals could have won the riding had there been more strategic voting. The Tories won it by only 868 votes. If several thousand of the 7000 NDP voters had voted strategically Liberal, the Liberals could have won the seat. In 1993, the Liberals won the seat in a landslide. In 1997, and 2000, Liberal Larry McCormick won the riding both times by a comfortable margin but with only 39% of the vote. In 1997, he won the riding by a large 6000 votes yet with only 39%. In 2000, the Alliance candidate did well enough to receive 30% of the vote to McCormick’s 39%, closing the gap somewhat and the Liberals being victorious by a reduced margin of 3769 votes. In this riding it was the PCs and the Reform/Alliance who split the vote and allowed the Liberals to win. The PC candidate was Daryl Kramp in 1997 and 2000, who is now a Tory MP for the neighbouring Prince Edward—Hastings riding. He claims to be a Red Tory but has never voted in parliament like a Red Tory so is in my opinion much like any other Conservative. I believe that even in 2000 with a Red Tory leader Joe Clark, the votes for the PC candidate Kramp were mostly Conservative minded voters who would have moved and eventually did move to the new Conservative party in 2004. This is unlike in more left-leaning ridings where 1 Alliance vote plus 1 PC vote did not equal 2 Conservative votes because a number of the PC votes were more Red Tory-oriented votes. It was in ridings like Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington that a true vote split did exist in the 2000 election. I however think that indeed in many ridings the vote splitting issue in 2000 did not have as big an effect on the final outcome as Conservatives claim. Clark after all was a Red Tory and if you look closely at the results of the 2004 election you will see approximately half, give or take, of the PC votes of the 2000 election moving to the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party only lost ground overall in 2004 because of a surge in support for both the Bloc and NDP. Without the NDP and Bloc surge, the Liberals could have clearly won another majority government even with a United Right. By that same token, as much as Conservative supporters do not want to hear this, the optics of the 2000 election mean that the Liberals could have won a majority government against a United Right had that United Right been led by Stockwell Day or some other Alliance type possibly even including Stephen Harper. Such a United Right would have taken at most around half of what went to the PCs (as the 2004 election shows) due to this right-wing party being unable to have broad appeal because of it’s right wing policies due to it being led by an Alliance-type leader. The result would have been a smaller Liberal majority government but a majority government nevertheless. Even in Ontario ridings in 2000 with a technical vote split, many would have gone Liberal because even a small amount of the PC vote going Liberal would have enabled the Liberal candidate to beat the united Conservatives. I know it pains Conservatives to hear this, but I suspect the 2000 election results with a United Right would likely have looked approximately something like this:

Liberal: 46%
United Right/Conservative: 32%
Bloc Quebecois: 11%
NDP: 9%

Such a result almost certainly would have produced a Liberal majority against a United Right.

Unfortunately, any pretense of ever winning back the rural Frontenac/Lennox and Addington riding are gone now that it has been redistributed to include much of the very, very Conservative Lanark County. Lanark County’s conservatism greatly overshadows any moderation that exists in Frontenac and Lennox and Addington and makes the riding one of the safest Tory seats in the country outside Alberta with no hope of the Liberals winning the riding ever in the foreseeable future.

This unfortunate product of redistribution also negatively affects two Eastern Ontario ridings at the provincial level. That same redistributed Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington riding and the modified Prince Edward-Hastings riding in essence have neither of their respective Liberal incumbents running in the riding again. Ernie Parsons of Prince Edward-Hastings is for some reason not running again after only two terms in the legislature even though Parsons is only 61. Although the modified riding now includes conservative northern Hastings that was previously part of the other riding, the redistributed results still have the Liberals easily winning the riding by over 10,000 votes. What this indicates to me is that although northern Hastings is normally very conservative, Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington’s incumbent Leona Dombrowsky (who hails from the northern Hastings part of her current riding) has enough personal popularity in northern Hastings that she was able to win the Hastings part of the riding that the Liberals came third in in 1997 and in which the Liberals came second to the Alliance in 2000. It is presumably for this reason that Dombrowsky is moving over and running in the now vacated Prince Edward-Hastings and leaving Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington to some unnamed Liberal candidate. I only hope that Ernie is retiring on his own and didn’t retire only due to the threat of a nomination challenge from the sitting Minister Dombrowsky. Perhaps Dombrowsky did not want to run in Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington because she thought she might lose. Although the Liberals narrowly won in the redistributed results, I expect the results were too close to give Dombrowsky much comfort. As a result I suspect she took advantage of the incumbent retiring in Prince Edward-Hastings to run in a seat that contains part of her old riding and in which she has a better chance of winning than in Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington. The unfortunate part of this is that now Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington will almost certainly be won by the right-wing Tory candidate now running in it because there is no Liberal incumbent running in the riding.

On a related note, Dombrowsky was first elected in her seat in 1999 in what was supposed to be a safe Tory seat. Pundits and commentators, however, failed to realize that that riding contained dissatisfaction with the Harris government DESPITE being a rural riding. The result was that Dombrowsky was able to unexpectedly beat the incumbent Tory candidate and became the MPP. Both times Dombrowsky ran, she outpolled her federal Liberal counterpart Larry McCormick. In fact, the provincial Liberals have outpolled the federal Liberals in many rural parts of the province in both 1999 and 2003. If the Liberals want to be re-elected in 2007, they need to again outpoll the federal Liberals in these rural areas and indeed have to win some seats that are held by the federal Tories. I’m worried that a recent bill the Liberals passed may make this harder. A recent Bill that amended the election act included amendments to make it so that the political affiliation of each candidate is listed directly on the ballot rather than on a piece of paper near the ballot box. I’m concerned that this will hurt the Liberals in anti-federal Liberal ridings like Elgin-Middlesex-London that have a popular provincial Liberal incumbent for voters to see the name “Liberal” on the ballot. I’m concerned this will disincline people to personally support the popular Liberal incumbent and instead to vote Conservative as no doubt many of them would in a federal election. I don’t know why the Liberals made this change to the law when it could make it harder for them to win re-election.

I’ve mentioned several of these rural ridings. Another one to watch is Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry. This riding has swung sharply to the federal Tories in the last two federal elections. Although this riding was only narrowly won by the Liberals in 1999, in 2003 the Liberals easily won the riding with a new Liberal candidate. However, the Tories did get a slightly above-average showing. This newly elected Liberal from 2003, Jim Brownell, I hear is very personally popular. Although Mayor of Cornwall since 2006, the 2004 Liberal incumbent Bob Kilger was in 2004 not that personally popular. This, combined with the social conservatism of the region, made Kilger lose his seat. In my estimation, Brownell has more personal popularity than Kilger did at the time. It is because of this that Brownell has a chance to win the riding for the provincial Liberals even though the seat has swung so sharply to the Tories at the federal level. It is these ridings that the Conservatives hold at the federal level that it is vital that the Liberals win if they want to win another majority government.