Ground Report

April 3, 2011

This afternoon, I attended the office opening for St. Paul's Conservative candidate Maureen Harquail. It was my first time networking and talking with fellow Conservatives in the riding, since moving here in December.

I was struck, immediately, by the crowd. It was huge! The reports of Toronto being a Liberal bastion may soon be coming to an end; the number of people at the event was impressive, as was the fact that it represented a diverse cross-section of the population of the riding and the city as a whole. Old and young, new Canadians and those who have been here for generations, men and women and more. Talk, not just in the room (where the crowd is biased), but on the street is that Carolyn Bennett, the longtime incumbent Liberal MP, is grating on the nerves of constituents. There is also quite a bit of grumbling that, "coincidentally" the day of the confidence vote, the riding was blanketed by a Carolyn Bennett householder featuring her "accomplishments" over the past weeks and months, as well as a number of photos (which were hard to see and horrendously stretched - desktop publishing is not a strength of Bennett's office, apparently).

Slowly but surely, Conservative candidates with strong credentials like Maureen Harquail, are making a dent in the Liberal's last big bastion of support: downtown Toronto. I'm happy to be a part of it and am looking forward to having her represent me in Ottawa after May 2.