Scarborough-Guildwood & Kanata-Carleton Byelection Previews

Let's take a trip to Ontario to see how Thursday's byelections could shape up

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Overview

On Thursday, July 27th, two ridings in Ontario are set to go to the polls to elect new representatives to send to Queen’s Park; Scarborough-Guildwood and Kanata-Carleton.

Scarborough-Guildwood

The first riding up for grabs is Scarborough-Guildwood, a riding that sits at the far eastern ends of Toronto proper. Since its creation for the 2007 election, the riding has been held the Ontario Liberal’s, first under Margarett Best and then under Mitzie Hunter.

The riding is up for grabs after Mitzie Hunter bowed out of provincial politics to run for Toronto mayor in the 2023 Toronto mayoral byelection. Suffice it to say, the placard on the mayor’s office does not say Mitzie Hunter, so this abandonment of her seat at Queen’s Park was for naught (Although rumour was Hunter was tired and/or bored of Queen’s Park given the Liberal’s non-party status, and the lack of sway the party has in turn, in the current parliament).

The riding can be a competitive one, but usually thanks to huge vote splits between the Liberals and NDP, bringing the PC’s much closer to overtaking the Liberals than they otherwise would. In 2018, Hunter only won the riding by 74 votes over the PC’s thanks to the Liberals tanking and the NDP jumping that election. She’d go on to expand that lead, as the Liberals recovered in 2022, to a margin of 3787 votes.

The PC’s are running Toronto city councillor from ward 20, Gary Crawford, so they’re definitely hoping for local representation to boost them on the ticket.

While byelections can be wild things, the Liberals are more likely than not to hold onto this seat come Thursday night.

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Kanata-Carleton

Kanata-Carleton sits on the western outskirts of the capital region. The riding is newer, having been created for the 2018 provincial election. But in its short-lived life the riding has been firmly in the hands of the governing PC’s.

Now the seat finds itself vacant thanks to former Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, Merrilee Fullerton, bowing out of politics. She resigned in March and set the stage for a byelection to take place.

In the previous election, the PC’s won the seat with 43.6% of the vote which was a comfortable lead over the next closest party, the NDP, which pulled 24.2%. Given the Liberals and NDP are still vote splitting to high heaven in provincial polling, it would be safe to say the PC’s should carry this seat without any issue.

That is if it wasn’t for a rogue campaign poll from the Liberals throwing just a hint of doubt onto that. You see the Liberals are running a candidate who has won in the seat of Kanata-Carleton before. This time however, it was for the Liberals at the federal level instead.

Former MP, Karen McCrimmon, is attempting to make a break into provincial politics by winning the seat of Kanata-Carleton. If she won it in 2015 and 2019 federally, she might win it on Thursday provincially, right? Well, we’re right back to vote splits again. The federal Liberals are famously much stronger than their provincial counterpart in Ontario and the federal NDP are famously much weaker than their provincial counterpart. McCrimmon may have won federally in 2019, but that was with 43% of the vote while the NDP garnered only 12.5% (Compare that to their 24.2% provincially and the Ontario Liberals 23.4%).

Then there’s that rogue poll. Supposedly the McCrimmon campaign got Mainstreet to do a poll, that was then leaked online, showing McCrimmon ahead of the PC candidate by about 6-points.

How accurate is that poll? Guess we’ll have to see. But as a rule of thumb, I always prefer to take internal polls with a heaping pile of salt compared to publicly done polls.

If either of these ridings are going to be interesting, it may well be Kanata-Carleton, if that poll is remotely correct that is.

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List of Candidates

Scarborough-Guildwood:

• PC - Gary Crawford

• Liberal - Andrea Hazell

• NDP - Thadsha Navaneethan

• Green - Tara McMahon

• New Blue - Danielle Height

Kanata-Carleton

• PC - Sean Webster

• NDP - Melissa Coenraad

• Liberal - Karen McCrimmon

• Green - Steven Warren

• New Blue - Jennifer Boudreau

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