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Totally Tory
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Date Posted: 15:11:56 04/28/02 Sun
Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Association, Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Constituency -
Information about the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance in this Southwestern Ontario Riding. Includes a map, message board, guest book, poll, news, links to board executive and a directory.
http://www.angelfire.com/on4/bgoscrca/
On April 29, 1997, five years ago today, The Reform Party of Canada (RPC) unveiled its platform, in anticipation towards the 1997 federal June 2 election, and declared "We're arguing the 21st century belongs to the Reform". The Confederation has witnessed a populist party, through Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and now Stephen Harper that Canada, especially Ontario, is needing. The kind of Reform only the Alliance can give NOW! One people vote for out of frustration and anger towards the government's dictatorial establishment and helps put the people back in the driver's seat and their wishes back on the mandate. This anti-government frenzy is constantly provoked by the long living legacy of corrupt Prime Ministers Progressive Conservative Mulroney and Liberal Jean Chretien adding more fever to the Reform Alliance freedom train's fire.
Chretien's constant reminder of Pierre Trudeau and Joe Clark's mirror image of Mulroney beg voter to continue not looking at these two as viable alternatives. Rather, the Reform Alliance has the Canadian Conservative option and that of the voter who want a real change to our same ol, same ol' system. Only the continual apathy of Canadian voters in Canadian elections will remain the juggernaut to the Reform Alliance as the public continue to bet their valuable futures on pointless Liberal and Progressive Conservative majority governments that help them not. If they only knew that restructuring federalism to give all provinces more powers, privileges and money plus equal treatment would squash the special interest mentality of our nation, they would vote Reform Alliance.
There have been scattered media reports suggesting Reform is leading or tied with the Liberals in 12 to 20 southern and central Ontario ridings. Reform Party strategist Rick Anderson names St. Catharines, Perth Middlesex, Lambton-Kent-Middlesex, Peterborough, Simcoe North, Simcoe Grey, Huron Bruce and Bruce Grey as ridings that enjoy high concentrations of Reform support. He also says 17 of Reform's 50 best-shot ridings in the country lie in the area between Toronto and Windsor, the Niagara Peninsula and Huron-Bruce. Another dozen are scattered around the rest of Ontario, from Peterboro and Barrie to Leeds-Grenville and Lanark-Carleton in Eastern Ontario, Anderson says.
Manning seeks Ontario seats to help Reform become a national party
OWEN SOUND, Ont., Can. (CP) -- Preston Manning predicts the fragmentation of the House of Commons would lead to Reform's emergence as a new national party.
"We're in transition," he said Friday after a speech to about 400 supporters.
"Something old is dying and something new is being born. It is a dangerous time in one respect, but on the other hand, there has never been the prospect of change in Canada there has been now.
"It shows that old ideas are cracking up."
Still, there have been scattered media reports suggesting Reform is leading or tied with the Liberals in 12 to 20 southern and central Ontario ridings. Mr. Anderson contends that the reports are true, based on "an amalgamation of provincial sources and their polls, newspaper polls, what we're hearing in our ridings and so on." He names St. Catharines, Perth Middlesex, Brampton Middlesex, Peterborough, Simcoe North, Simcoe Grey, Huron Bruce and Bruce Grey as ridings that enjoy high concentrations of Reform support.
Mr. Anderson notes that the Environics poll showed the Liberals dropping seven points in Ontario since the start of the campaign, while the Reform party has gained six. "If that is a one-time trend, and the election had been held last week, we would have won about 20 or so ridings," he says. "But if both of those events are trends, and the Liberals repeat that seven-point drop in the second half, then we'll win a lot of seats."
The Walkerton tragedy will have little effect on the federal results in this riding. This is a riding where small-c conservative policies have long been popular. Ovid Jackson is yet another weak Liberal MP who managed to squeak by in 1997 by default as a result of vote-splitting on the right. Stockwell Day's conservative populism will resonate strongly in much of the riding. Also a weak Tory Party creates the right climate for an Alliance victory. Moreover, C-68 is highly unpopular in this rural riding, further benefiting the Alliance odds.
Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound went Liberal in 1997 with only a 3.57% margin over the Reform candidate. This rural Ontario riding is prime Alliance territory and barring any CA campaign disasters I would bet this time around B-G-OS goes CA
Tory Defectors Hold Key
"Further west, in Owen Sound, campaign organizers are focused on the 1997 results - and everyone acknowledges that Tory voters will decide the outcome.
Ken Watson, the Canadian Alliance campaign manager in Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound, pointed out that the Conservatives polled 11,139 votes.
``You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that if we get some Conservative votes . . .'' he said.
Liberal MP Ovid Jackson has no illusion about who will decide his fate.
``Conservatives have to make a decision,'' he said.
In 1997, Jackson was re-elected with 17,896 votes - 1,735 votes more than Murray Peer, then running for Reform.
Privately, Liberals are worried that the polarization may mean the end of Jackson's career.
Rural unhappiness about Bill C-68, the gun registration legislation, and religious activism on the abortion issue are both mobilizing issues in the riding.
Karen Gventer, an environmental consultant working in Owen Sound, who argues that the New Democratic Party is the only party with a serious commitment to restoring health care.
But Progressive Conservative candidate Allen Wilford is the wild card.
The Durham farmer and lawyer acknowledged his campaign started late, and many Conservatives have already jumped ship - either left to the Liberals, or right to the Alliance.
But they hold the key to the outcome."
As he won fairly safely in '93, Ovid Jackson's Reform scare in '97 was a bit surprising perhaps successful pro-Reform rallying by maverick Tory MPP Bill Murdoch? Reform's strength was most visible in rural Grey County and the Bruce Peninsula. So, there's real uncertainty behind what might have looked like a dead-on Alliance pickup, here...
Meanwhile, fellow Tory MPP Bill Murdoch, another outspoken Alliance supporter who was rumoured to be considering a federal run in his riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound last year, said that “there’s about a one per cent chance” that Mr. Harris would consider a career in federal politics.
Liberal MP Ovid Jackson and CA Murray Peer
Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, ON
It’s hard to say what the Walkerton tragedy will mean for federal politics in this riding. The Liberals barely won this one in 1997, getting by with 36.8% of the vote and by a margin of only 3.6%
The "CA Hopefuls"
The Alliance has a decent shot in all of these ridings. However, with Stockwell Day's poor showings in the recent polls, don't expect more then one or two of them will go CA. They are: Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, Elgin-Middlesex-London, Erie-Lincoln, Haliburton-Victoria-Brock, Leeds-Grenville, Nepean-Carleton, Simcoe-Grey and St. Catharines.
Hate as a 'Canadian value'
Chretien's smear campaign against Stockwell Day and his party pays off in the early going
SUCCESSFUL election campaigns invariably focus on perhaps three main themes. The trick is to come up with a few simple messages voters find attractive and repeat them over and over until they become synonymous with the party and its leader. So far in Canada's federal election campaign 2000, no Party has effectively "branded" itself. Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Party (CA) leader Stockwell Day may be closer to it than any other, but there is a big problem. Most of the branding of Mr. Day and his party has been done by his opponents.
Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, assisted by Liberal candidates, the Grit propaganda machine, fading political leaders Joe Clark and Alexa McDonough and left-wing reactionaries in the Canadian media, has repeatedly portrayed the Alliance party as an ultra-conservative northern subsidiary of the extreme right of the U.S. Republican Party, led by a sexist, racist and homophobic evangelical Christian zealot. In the first two weeks of the campaign alone, Mr. Chretien said repeatedly that an Alliance government would privatize medicare and destroy the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These are grotesque exaggerations, refuted in innumerable ways by the words and deeds of the party and its leader, but they have planted just enough fear in the hearts and minds of Liberal, Conservative, NDP and non-aligned voters in Ontario and Atlantic Canada to stunt the new party's electoral potential.
Mr. Day overcame similar slanders to win the Alliance leadership from Preston Manning earlier this year, but that was a pillow fight compared to the all-out war he is in now. Nobody in the Manning camp accused him of appealing to "the dark side that exists in human beings," or linked him to Nazism, as Mr. Chretien did in an October 27 speech. Moreover, Mr. Day had much more time and far fewer voters to reach during the leadership race, and most of those voters were either friendly to his religious beliefs or at least tolerant of them.
As in most modern political campaigns, the Alliance strategy is essentially two-pronged. First, it seeks to brand itself as the party most closely associated with popular policies such as tax reduction, an improved healthcare system, parliamentary reform, elimination of wasteful government spending and a crackdown on crime. Second, it tries to promote the personality of its leader by emphasizing his youthfulness, idealism, tolerance and competence.
But the policy differences between the Liberals and the Alliance have become impossibly blurry. The Grits have stolen the CA's tax-cut platform by promising major reductions of their own, and in an obvious bid to blunt the "extremist" label, Mr. Day and his party have muddied their positions on employment insurance, healthcare reform, regional transfer payments and decentralization of power from Ottawa to the provinces.
In the absence of a pivotal policy issue that sets the parties unequivocally apart, the battleground has inevitably shifted to the personalities of the main combatants. Through the first third of the campaign, it appeared the Liberal demonization of Mr. Day had been more successful in key political markets than Alliance attempts to portray Mr. Chretien as arrogant and opportunistic. CA strategists, frustrated by their opponents' success, debated furiously among themselves whether they should "go negative" and respond to the Liberals' vicious and hyperbolic personal attacks in kind.
Mr. Day himself seemed most resistant to returning nastiness for nastiness. In speeches, he passed over some of the critical references to Mr. Chretien that appeared in the written text. He insisted he was sticking to his "agenda of respect," and joked that he was getting a sore neck from "turning the other cheek" so often. Badgered relentlessly by the prime minister and the media for misstating the direction of the flow of the Niagara River at a campaign stop intended to highlight the brain drain, Mr. Day displayed his genius for self-deprecating humour by saying he had recently seen a flock of Canada geese flying north. And he took the sting out of the occasional personal barbs he aimed at the PM by leavening them with wit, as in his response to a question from the pop culture mavens at MuchMusic. Asked to identify "Slim Shady," a stage name of the rap music star Eminem, Mr. Day replied that he was slim and Mr. Chretien was shady.
But a dignified debating style and a sunny disposition are not, by themselves, going to overcome the enormous lead the Liberals enjoy in the polls. The Day brand needs something more, something distinctive, appealing and interesting to help it break the Liberals' control over the Alliance message. Some observers and campaign insiders think Mr. Day's ace in the hole is the one thing he does that is completely out of character for any modern politician: on principle, he does not campaign on Sundays.
It certainly contrasts sharply with Mr. Chretien, who announced the election in Ottawa on Sunday, October 22, and promptly headed off to a rally with 400 supporters at a hotel--subsidized by a questionable $600,000 federal jobs grant--in Shawinigan, Que. Mr. Day stayed home, as he has tried to do every Sunday during his 14-year political career, and no doubt watched the TV news in some frustration as the prime minister launched his campaign of insults and invective. But Mr. Day's self-imposed absence on day one of the campaign was also a huge part of the election kickoff story, receiving prominent mention on both the CBC and CTV national television newscasts that night, and in every major newspaper in the country the next day.
Seven days later, he did it again. And thousands more voters who missed it the first time saw the networks and newspapers dutifully report the activities of all the leaders, plus the inactivity of Mr. Day. By the time voting day arrives November 27, the Alliance leader will have sacrificed six precious days out of the 36-day campaign for his faith and family. The story will be especially big on Sunday, November 26, when all the other leaders will be sprinting for the finish line. So when the polls open for an estimated 20 million voters the next day, many may know little of the policies of the various parties, but it is reasonable to expect that almost all of them will know that the leader of the Canadian Alliance is unique among all the other major political leaders in this election or any other in recent memory.
"I've started doing it [taking Sundays off] too," says Pat Dunn, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer who is running for the Alliance in Haliburton-Victoria-Brock, considered one of the most winnable ridings for the new party in Ontario. "Haliburton is not the Bible Belt by any stretch, but we have a lot of people who think a 'day of rest' is a pretty good idea." Mr. Dunn is one of several Ontario Alliance candidates and campaign managers who say they are following Mr. Day's Sundays-off example. The follow-the-leader phenomenon appears to be unscripted, but Mr. Dunn senses that it is good politics because he thinks it helps neutralize the "scary" characteristics attached to Mr. Day.
Virtually everyone agrees that Campaign 2000 will be won or lost in Ontario on the strength of the performances of Mr. Chretien and Mr. Day. Pollster Ipsos-Reid conducted a survey of 1,500 Canadians in the days just before and just after the election call. At the time, the Liberals' managerial competence and public accountability were under fire from both the auditor general and the federal information commissioner, and there were a number of widely reported incidents which portrayed the prime minister as addlepated and ill-tempered. Much was made, too, of his early election call, and the ruthless political machinations which preceded it, provoking charges of opportunism and arrogance. Under the circumstances, it was not too surprising that Ipsos-Reid found national support for the Alliance at its highest level ever--28%, with the Liberals at 45% among decided voters--and rising approval and disapproval ratings for Messrs. Day and Chretien respectively.
But there was nothing in the poll to indicate a major shift in the distribution of seats in the House of Commons. In fact, poll-based computations by Wilfred Laurier University political scientist Barry Keys suggested the Liberals were poised to add 25 seats to the 161 they held at dissolution. Prof. Keys projected a Grit sweep of Atlantic Canada as a result of collapsed support for the PC and NDP parties, modest Liberal gains in Quebec at the expense of the Bloc Québécois, and even three new seats for the governing party in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. He projected a three-seat breakthrough for the Alliance in Ontario, but suggested that overall, the party will win only 60 seats, the same number it won in 1997.
On November 2 the Environics Group unveiled another national poll, conducted October 26-30, that narrowed the gap between the Liberals (45%) and the Alliance (29%) to 16 percentage points. But the spread was 26 points in Ontario, five more than the earlier Ipsos-Reid sample. Overall, the Environics poll seemed to confirm the potential for a Liberal sweep of Atlantic Canada, a two-party showdown between the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois in Quebec, a modest Alliance threat to the Grit monopoly of Ontario, and a near sweep of the West by the Alliance, except for parts of Manitoba and Greater Vancouver.
The polling and the projections seemed to confirm the widely held suspicion during the first third of the campaign that fear of Mr. Day and the Alliance continued to outweigh loathing of Mr. Chretien and the Liberals. Grit scaremongering is proving especially effective in Atlantica, where the "values" debate turns on protecting regional social welfare programs paid for by wealth transfers from Ontario and Alberta. The plummeting fortunes of the NDP and the Tories, both of which are polling in single digits nationally, appear to validate the Liberal strategy of portraying the election as a clash of ideologically polarized titans.
It is possible, however, that the Liberals and their allies could go too far, and provoke a sympathetic backlash for Mr. Day. Some Alliance supporters in Ontario think they won at least a few backlash votes as a result of an exceptionally hateful attack on their party in the Toronto Star, the largest circulation and most obviously partisan Liberal newspaper in the country. Penned by "Slinger," the Star's resident political satirist and muckraker, the November 2 column suggested the Alliance is the favoured political home of "bigots, racists, flat-Earthers, sexists, homophobes, anti-evolutionists, believers in the International Jewish Conspiracy, believers that Jesus Christ is Lord of the Universe, believers that non-Christians have a snowball's chance in hell of going to heaven, space alien abductees, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nationists, and those who want the infirm and the handicapped put away, if not put down." How damaging to the Alliance such screeds are is hard to say. An on-line Toronto Star poll found 60% of 750 respondents approving of politicians taking Sundays off.
During the intense media scrutiny that accompanied Mr. Day's winning of the Alliance leadership, his personal and political life was subjected to the most thorough investigation of any new national party leader in Canadian history. The reactionary secular establishment was instantly hostile upon learning that he is a practising evangelical Christian and one-time administrator of an independent religious school. And when they learned that as a politician he had spoken against tax-funded abortions and expanded rights for homosexuals, and in favour of capital punishment, the die was cast for the current election campaign. Even though Mr. Day leads a party that has substantially moderated its policies for mass appeal, and expresses its pluralism by offering a field of candidates whose personal views span the entire length and breadth of the social policy spectrum, he has been cast as a mortal enemy of the modern liberal elites. The hyperbole of Messrs. Chretien and Slinger suggests they will stop at nothing to destroy him.
Whether they succeed or not will depend greatly on how Mr. Day comports himself during the last half of the campaign. His campaign co-chairman, Calgary MP Jason Kenney, was still insisting as this magazine went to press November 5 that the leader was going to stick to the high road. He predicted that the Liberal attacks will intensify in direct proportion to Alliance gains in the polls. The Grits have embraced what Mr. Kenney calls "moderate McCarthyism," referring to the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. "They'll try to sandbag us on hot social issues by finding candidates who are outspoken on issues like pro-life," he says. "But the shrill rhetoric will backfire. Most ordinary folks, even those of no particular religious persuasion, are very impressed by his [Mr. Day's] convictions."
Conrad Winn, president of the polling firm COMPAS, thinks the agenda of respect, turning the other cheek and the Sundays-off policy are all helpful to Mr. Day's cause. These are representations of the "politics of conviction" that are in great demand, according to Mr. Winn's polling. "But Canadians don't want a Sunday school teacher as prime minister," he adds. Mr. Day needs to counterpunch when he is personally attacked, preferably by "turning the tables" on his opponents. For example, when Mr. Chretien accuses him of supporting "two-tiered" healthcare, Mr. Day should assert that two-tiered healthcare exists in Canada today because of the multi-billion dollar Liberal cuts to provincial transfer payments. To avoid compromising his "respectful" posture, Mr. Winn suggests Mr. Day remember that the "facts you assert [must be] stronger than the language you use to advance them."
The Alliance leader should also designate surrogates to engage the Liberals and their allies in close, dirty fighting, according to Mr. Winn. "Like every hockey team," he says,"you need a goal scorer and a bone-breaker." But he's not sure that Mr. Day's team is as practised in political stickwork as the Liberals. Most of them came up through the minor leagues in Alberta, as part of the one-party Tory monopoly. "Chretien's advantage is that he was brought up and trained in a much more competitive political environment."
Mr. Winn notes that the nationally televised debates on November 8 and 9 represented a huge opportunity for Mr. Day to advance his cause by raising confidence in his trustworthiness, tolerance and competence. And if he firmly parried the charges of extremism and intolerance from Mr. Chretien and the other party leaders, while maintaining his aura of conviction, good humour and civility, the campaign could get very interesting indeed.
The Ontario ridings that will tell the tale of Election 2000
Even the most pessimistic Alliance party operatives believe that the party will take at least three seats in Ontario on November 27. The optimists reckon 10 to 15, and the starry-eyed dreamers are predicting as many as 40. Large, enthusiastic crowds have been turning out for nomination meetings and campaign events featuring leader Stockwell Day, but there is controversy and resentment brewing in some ridings over head office meddling in the nominations process. And just about every local campaign has a horror story to tell about the organizational failings of the party brass.
There are at least three lists circulating around Alliance campaign offices which rank Ontario's 103 ridings according to their winability. One is based on a simple calculation derived from the 1997 federal election results. It includes the 29 ridings where the combined Reform-Conservative vote exceeded that of the winning Liberal candidate, and ranks them according to how much of the Tory vote has to move over to beat the Grit total. Another list is the Alliance party's internal national ranking of Canada's 301 constituencies. It factors in not only past election results, but also the number of members in each riding and the amount of money they have raised.
Most sophisticated is an Ontario riding list assembled by Naresh Raghubeer and David Lancaster, two legislative assistants with Premier Mike Harris' provincial Conservative government. Mr. Raghubeer is also the campaign manager for the Alliance candidate in Mississauga Centre, Harjit Dhaliwal. Messrs. Raghubeer and Lancaster have factored in the 1999 provincial election results as well as the 1997 federal election data.
All this number-crunching has produced a consensus that the top three prospects for the Alliance are the rural, south-central ridings of Simcoe-Grey, Haliburton-Victoria-Brock, and Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound. Each is now held by a federal Liberal backbencher and a provincial Tory MPP. (Both levels of government use the same riding boundaries.) The Reform candidate finished second in each riding in 1997, and in each case the Reform and Tory campaigns combined to take at least 55% of the popular vote.
According to the latest polls, PC support across Ontario has fallen to about 9%, half of what it was in the 1997 election. Alliance strategists assume most of those votes have moved to their party, and they hope the diehards will stay with the PCs to the bitter end. Many are probably Red Tories who will sooner or later wind up with the Liberals. That is not a problem in Simcoe-Grey, where Grit incumbent Paul Bonwick would have lost in 1997 if only 4% of the Tory vote had gone to Reform. It is a measure of the CA's disorganization in Ontario, however, that the nomination meeting that selected country lawyer George Demery to be the candidate did not occur until after the election had been called.
If Haliburton Alliance candidate Pat Dunn gets 8% of the 1997 Tory vote, and nothing else changes, he would beat Liberal incumbent John O'Reilly. Mr. Dunn is poised to do just that because this is his second try, and he is backed by 1,700 card carrying party members in the riding, up from 400 in 1997. On four days' notice at the beginning of the current campaign, Mr. Dunn and his supporters got about 700 people out to a Stockwell Day rally in Lindsay, the largest town in the riding. Mr. Dunn's only worry is the fact that the Tories have nominated Laurie Scott, daughter of a popular Tory MP who held the riding for 28 years.
Murray Peer is carrying the Alliance banner in the neighbouring riding of Bruce-Grey. Like Mr. Dunn, he's an ex-policeman taking his second run at the MP's job, now held by Liberal Ovid Jackson. Had Mr. Peer taken 16% of the 1997 Tory vote, he would have won. Thus he ought to win this time, except for one thing: the town of Walkerton, made infamous this summer when a contaminated water supply led to the deaths of several residents, lies within the constituency. Many people hold the Conservative provincial government and its philosophy of privatization responsible. If the Alliance is judged to be cut from the same cloth as the Harris Tories, Mr. Peer may suffer.
Rounding out the top 10 winnable ridings for the Alliance in Ontario, according to the Raghubeer-Lancaster depth chart, are Oxford, Niagara Falls, Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, Oshawa, Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey and Parry Sound-Muskoka.
If all or most of those constituencies fall to the Alliance on election night, but no more, it will probably mean that the Liberals have won with a small majority, assuming they compensate for the Ontario losses in the Maritimes. If, however, ridings like Leeds-Grenville, Lanark-Carleton and Oakville, where retired Canadian Football League all-star lineman Dan Ferrone is running for the Alliance, start tipping to the new party, it may well mean that a minority Liberal government is on the way.
The Liberals are likely to pick up at least one of those ridings, but they can also expect to lose several others within Ontario. In particular, backbenchers Paul Bonwick (Simcoe-Grey), Ovid Jackson (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound), and John O’Reilly (Haliburton-Victoria-Brock) are in serious danger of losing their seats. Several others are also facing strong challenges in their ridings, including one issued by former CFL star and players’ association president Dan Ferrone, who is running for the Alliance against Bonnie Brown in Etobicoke.
Alliance hot on Simcoe, Owen Sound
The Canadian Alliance must win Ontario ridings like Simcoe-Grey and Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound if it wants to make a breakthrough in the vote-rich and all-important province, say Alliance strategists.
If the Canadian Alliance is going to make a breakthrough in Ontario in this fall’s election, it will almost certainly begin in the central region of the province that spans from the northwestern reaches of the Greater Toronto Area through cities and towns such as Barrie, Collingwood and Owen Sound, encompassing sizeable areas of farm and cottage country.
But if Stockwell Day’s party does not win in ridings such as Simcoe-Grey and Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, it’s unlikely to see electoral success anywhere else in the province, either. Small-c conservatives and those dissatisfied with the Liberal government because of everything from gun control to levels of taxation, this is the most Alliance-friendly turf east of Manitoba — and it includes other ridings such as Simcoe North, Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey, and Barrie-Simcoe-Bradford as well.
But in order to defeat the Liberal incumbents in this area, the Alliance needs its individual candidates in each riding to run well-staffed local campaigns that rival those of their opponents in terms of on-the-ground organization. Of course, when the main opponent is a Member of Parliament who has already won two elections in the riding, matching his or her campaign structure is an added challenge — and one that many of the Alliance’s campaign officials acknowledge.
“We’re in good shape when you compare us to other [Alliance campaigns],” said Don Wilcox, a spokesperson for Simcoe-Grey Alliance candidate George Demery. But from an organizational perspective, said Mr. Wilcox, “we’re not in good shape when you compare us to the incumbent.”
Working to the advantage of Alliance campaigns in this part of the province is the fact that local interest appears to be quite high. Even taking into account the tendency for campaign representatives of all stripes to inflate volunteer totals for public consumption, it is clear that there is a significant degree of enthusiasm in these ridings that is tremendously helpful to each campaign.
That level of enthusiasm is “much the same as it was with the Common Sense Revolution, with Mike Harris,” said Mike Armstrong, who serves as campaign manager for Alliance candidate Don Crawford in Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey. In that riding, the Alliance has set up two campaign offices to help reach voters in different areas, and claims to have a volunteer base approaching 1,000 members.
Patrick O’Neil, campaign manager for second-time Alliance candidate Peter Stock in Simcoe North, suggested that enthusiasm is not limited to actual campaign volunteers. At the door, he said, voters’ attitudes ranged from “open hostility to cool curiousity” in the 1997 campaign; this time, he reported, it’s “enthusiastic support to honest interest.”
But in order to achieve success at the polls on Nov. 27, Alliance candidates in these key ridings will also be relying upon a strong central effort from their party to help with a variety of organizational and strategic aspects. The involvement of senior party officials has been a mixed blessing, at least in terms of getting the campaigns up and running.
Some local Alliance campaigns are miffed that their riding associations were asked to delay nomination meetings until late last month, leaving them in a state of disorganization when the writ was dropped on Oct. 22.
“We had an election readiness seminar in this riding in June, and we were ready to go,” said Mr. Wilcox. “And we kept getting told, ‘Hold off, hold off, hold off.’”
Mr. Wilcox added that, in Simcoe-Grey, “we didn’t get out of the gate as quickly as we would have liked to.” And, although quick to mention that he was not trying to assess blame, he noted that the late nomination date (Mr. Demery was finally nominated on Oct. 25, three days after the election had been called) “was Calgary’s decision...we would have held it two months ago, if we’d had our way.”
Mr. O’Neil agreed. The Alliance’s nomination meeting in Simcoe North was held only slightly earlier, on Oct. 20. “The party had wanted to hold back on nominations in order to attract more candidates,” he said. “Our original nomination date was moved back, because of the party’s suggestion.”
That party-imposed delay has forced most Alliance campaigns to scramble in order to establish a strong local organization and, perhaps more importantly, to produce and distribute key resources such as brochures and lawn signs.
“If there’s any one shortage” for the central campaign, said Mr. Armstrong in Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey, “it would be in getting the millions of pieces of print material available on such short notice.”
Most campaign representatives, however, say that they are pleased with the overall efforts of the Alliance’s central campaign since the election was called, noting that they receive daily calls from the party’s head office to provide guidance and resources if needed.
In addition, the Alliance appears to be providing its candidates with a central telephone bank that helps to canvass ridings in which the party has a strong chance of winning. This is an approach that has become quite common in recent years, and has been used frequently by both the provincial Conservatives and the federal Liberals in Ontario. Each local campaign has the opportunity to “buy into” the service, and if they choose to do so then a specific number of voters receive calls to introduce them to their candidate, and to gain information on their voting intentions. As with traditional, door-to-door canvassing, that information is then used on election day to help “bring out the vote,” either in person or over the phone.
Campaign representatives prefer not to disclose information on that particular practice, as they are clearly concerned that voters will be less willing to accept solicitation from a professional service rather than grassroots volunteers. But Rick Webster, campaign manager for Alliance nominee Rob Hamilton in Barrie-Simcoe-Bradford, acknowledged that “we’re using an outside source to do a significant number of voter ID calls,” and “that’s a party service.”
Interestingly, the Alliance campaign in Simcoe-Grey has decided not to do any door-to-door canvassing on weekday evenings, and instead has asked even its candidate to reach voters primarily by phone. In that case, the Alliance’s two local campaign offices allow it to operate 20 phones locally, but Mr. Armstrong also mentioned that “the national campaign team is doing a tremendous amount of work with the standard ID stuff, as far as I know.”
Beyond these key organizational matters, local campaign representatives professed to be impressed with the recent activities of the central party. All are quick to praise those working on leader Stockwell Day’s tour, for example, and it is generally acknowledged that Mr. Day is the candidates’ greatest asset when they are attempting to sell themselves to voters.
Taxpayers’ Dollars Should Be Handled With Care
Don’t Give the Liberals a Blank Cheque: Day
Owen Sound, ON - Clearly with the launch of their platform, the Liberals have reversed their much-vaunted "balanced" approach to managing Canada’s finances and are now asking Canadians for a blank cheque, warned Stockwell Day, Leader of the Canadian Alliance, during a visit to Owen Sound, Ontario.
Stephen Harper was competing against the “gold” on Sunday afternoon when his scheduled visit to Collingwood conflicted with the Canada/US Olympic hockey match. Regardless of the timing, Harper drew a nice-sized crowd of local organizers at Vacation Inn during his brief stopover between Barrie and Owen Sound on the Canadian Alliance leadership campaign.
Don Silcock, president Bruce Grey Owen Sound, was Harper's campaign director in the Mid-Western Ontario area and a current riding president key supporter of Stephen's. Joining Silcock in that area backing Harper were Ed Harper, former Simcoe Centre MP now Barrie Simcoe Bradford, and Wayne Edgett, president Simcoe North.
Come and Join the Bruce Grey Owen Sound Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Youth Association
Posted by Totally Tory on 4/27/2002, 9:23 pm
Hey, are you interested in politics? Have you and your friends been wanting to join a conservative youth club but your high school doesn't have one? Do you want to help in the process of bringing a Canadian Alliance Member of Parliament to Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound in the next election?
If you answered yes to these questions then Come and Join the Bruce Grey Owen Sound Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Youth Association - all are welcomed to join in the fun and, with another federal election around the corner, it promises to be a blast! I, myself, have been disheartened there was no high school club this year like this so I emailed for contact information and I recommend you do too!
The Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Youth Association (BGOSCRCAYA) is an excellent opportunity for young political enthusiasts to shape the future of the party. Furthermore, members have the chance to a form local youth riding to allow their MP to better represent the values of young Canadians and Ontarians in their constituency.
Join us in helping to shape a Canadian Alliance Bruce Grey Owen Sound we can all be proud of! Recruit some friends and email the BGOSCRCAYA today by youngreformers@yahoo.ca, visit http://www.geocities.com/youngreformers and get started today on your youth conservative political career by getting involved in the process and making a difference at the federal level!
P.S.: As a former Federal PC member and current Provincial PC member, I fully endorse the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance in the next federal election (2004) and ask all true blue conservatives (including Federal PC members or supporters) to think about the big picture and vote Alliance, as I will be and so will every other Bruce Grey Owen Sound conservative I know. I ask those not to vote Progressive Conservative federally to strategically remove our Liberal MP if you truly care to get conservative policies in for our riding and MP.
Thanks, Totally Tory
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