‘I think we have made our case to the voters of Kanata-Carleton.’
As she waited for election results at the Kanata Lone Star in a room decorated with red balloons, Liberal candidate Karen McCrimmon said she thought the election, like the 2023 byelection, was going to be tight.
“Voter turnout will make a huge difference,” she said. “We needed to inspire people to get out and vote on a cold, snowy February day or evening. And I’m hoping we will be able to do that, because it will be all about voter turnout.”
In the end, that turnout favoured the Liberal, with almost 48 per cent of the vote going to McCrimmon. PC candidate Scott Phelan took almost 41 per cent.
In an interview, McCrimmon said because the Liberals won 14 seats Thursday, when previously they had only nine, the party now has official status in the legislature. A party needs 12 seats for status.
“That’s huge. It means we get money for research, we get money for administrative support, all the perks that come with that,” she said.
“It’s going to make things a lot easier. And we have Mr. Ford with a whole bunch of very explicit promises. They are explicit, and we’re going to hold his feet to the fire, to make sure he delivers.”
McCrimmon said even though Doug Ford had focused on Trump and tariffs, voters at the door were more interested in family doctors. “That was the number one thing,” she said.
Despite Phelan’s loss, cheers erupted throughout the room at the Centre Ice Sports Bar as the runner-up arrived and made his way to the front.
“It actually feels pretty good to lose,” he said, to enthusiastic laughter from his supporters.
Evening Update
“You put yourself out there and you put your name on a sign and you don’t know where it’s going to go. You have to flip a coin. Sometimes it goes really well for you, and maybe it doesn’t work out this time around.”
Phelan said he aims to continue building on the connections he formed during the campaign by connecting with McCrimmon and the other candidates to see how they can all work together.
“At the end of the day, we all jumped in for the same goal, to make this riding better than we found it,” he told Postmedia.
He said his time in politics is not over yet, as he already looks ahead for another chance to secure a victory. “I’d love to take another run at it for sure,” he said.
Meanwhile, McCrimmon’s youngest campaign volunteer was Seb Leblanc, a 13-year-old Grade 8 student.
Leblanc said he got interested in the campaign when he met McCrimmon through air cadets and has volunteered knocking on doors.
There are 31 students in his class at W.O Mitchell Elementary School in Bridlewood.
“I like school, but I think that number could go down,” he said.
His father, Mike Leblanc, said his family is fortunate to have a family doctor, but many don’t.
“I think that’s the biggest issue facing Ontarians. And I don’t see why provincial politics doesn’t catch people’s eyes. It was good going door-to-door, just to remind people that it’s important to get out and vote.”
NDP candidate Dave Belcher, whose supporters had gathered at Buster’s Bar and Grill in Kanata, said the demographics in Kanata-Carleton have shifted.
“It’s a lot more centred around the urban area in Kanata,” he said. “And I think it’s a riding that is still being established in terms of political identity. We’ve been building since 2018 and then 2022 and then the byelection. I don’t think we can really say this is a Conservative riding anymore because it really is a different riding than it was for many years prior to 2018.”
This was Belcher’s first political campaign and he said there are things he would do differently, but the campaign was short and held in winter.
“A big strength of mine is talking to people about what we stand for. And it was disappointing to have few opportunities to do that because if the weather. I really can’t overstate how hard it is to have a conversation with someone when it’s minus 25 and windy.”
For decades, Kanata-Carleton and its predecessor ridings had skewed rural and Progressive Conservative.
The big question was whether the Tories could wrest it back from the Liberals on the strength of the riding’s deep blue roots and Doug Ford’s anti-tariff momentum in the face of opposition complaining that an election was expensive, unnecessary and failed to address the crises in health, housing and education.
Progressive Conservative Norm Sterling represented the riding and predecessor provincial ridings from 1977 to 2011, when rural populist Jack MacLaren won the Tory nomination for the riding of Carleton-Mississippi Mills.
MacLaren went on to beat Liberal challengers in the next two elections by more than 9,000 votes in 2011 and more than 10,000 votes in 2014. He was ejected from the Tory caucus in 2017 and joined the populist Trillium Party, but attracted only four per cent of the vote in 2018 while Conservative candidate and physician Merrilee Fullerton won Kanata-Carleton easily with more than 43 per cent of the vote.
In 2022, Fullerton again won over 43 per cent of the vote, but resigned in March 2023. That triggered a July 2023 byelection that saw the riding go to Liberal Karen McCrimmon. The 31-year military veteran won with 34.5 per cent of the vote compared to 32.97 for PC candidate Sean Webster, a former Canopy Growth executive, and 29.43 per cent for the NDP’s Melissa Coenraad, a medical lab technician.
There is growing suburban influence on the sprawling riding, which may explain the erosion in Conservative support. But McCrimmon was also a known quantity: she had won the federal riding of Kanata-Carleton in 2015 by a 7,618-vote margin over PC candidate Walter Pamic. She was re-elected in 2019 in a tighter race against PC Justina McCaffrey, but did not run in the 2021 federal election. (That win went to former city councillor Jenna Sudds, another Liberal.)
The NDP have made a consistently strong showing in the provincial riding in recent years. The NDP’s John Hansen came second with 29.17 per cent of the vote in the 2018 provincial election. In 2022, Coenraad came second with 24.24 per cent of the vote. She came in third in the 2023 election, but won 29.54 per cent of the vote.
The Green Party’s candidate in the riding was Jennifer Purdy, a physician with a focus on preventative medicine, and a 23-year Canadian Armed Forces veteran.
Also on the ballot were Frank Jakubowski of the Ontario Party and Elizabeth Watson is of the New Blue Party.
McCrimmon has argued that 11,000 of the riding’s approximately 110,000 residents can’t find a family doctor and has pitched a Liberal plan to ensure everyone in Ontario has a one close to home within the next four years by educating, attracting and retaining thousands of new domestic and internationally trained family physicians, as well as improving the Ontario Health Team network. On the housing front, McCrimmon said the Liberals support scrapping the provincial land transfer tax for first-time homebuyers, seniors who are downsizing, and non-profit home builders.
Belcher has argued for increasing the availability of community-based primary care by recruiting more healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurse practitioners and providing fair wages and support better working conditions and strive to maintain the health care workforce as well as increasing opportunities for internationally educated medical professionals to be licensed and trained in Ontario.
Phelan had said it’s important that a new primary health hub in Kanata move ahead quickly. He has said that knocking on doors and meeting people has been a priority in this election.
Purdy has contended that when it comes to increasing the supply of family physicians, it’s important to update the process for licensing internationally trained physicians and increase the number of seats in medical schools and in residency programs. But the best short-term solution is to pay family doctors appropriately.
— With files from Natasha Baldin.
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