The Canadian Federal Election of 2015 by Jon H. Pammett & Christopher Dornan

Author:Jon H. Pammett & Christopher Dornan [Pammett, Jon H. & Dornan, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays, Campaigns & Elections, Political Science, Political Process, Post-Confederation (1867-), History, Canada
ISBN: 9781459733350
Google: ONEkCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26384929
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2016-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

In my case, from beginning to end this election campaign lasted 881 days — two years, four months, and twenty-eight days. That’s the time from my first formal point of contact with the Liberal Party organization in Huron-Bruce through to the day of the election. For the final eighteen months I was campaigning almost full-time.

Before we plunge into the campaign itself, however, a glance at the riding of Huron-Bruce and then a brief biography.

The boundaries of the riding known since 1976 as Huron-Bruce have shifted over the years. The riding is nestled along the shores of Lake Huron and comprises all of Huron County and the southern part of Bruce County. It is one of the most rural ridings in the country with no major urban centres, no train stations, and no airports beyond municipal landing strips. Everyone in Huron-Bruce lives on a farm, on a country road, or in a small town. The Huron County part — Ontario’s agricultural heartland — has long been considered a Tory stronghold. Over the years, bits and pieces of Bruce County, which lies to the north and was traditionally more Liberal, were added to the riding.

From the 1950s to the 1993 election of Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, the area was held by a series of long-serving Progressive Conservative MPs. In the 1993 Chrétien sweep, Huron-Bruce fell to Liberal candidate Paul Steckle, who many regarded as a rather conservative, blue Liberal. He won the riding five times, operating as something of a maverick — opposing his own party on such issues as abortion, gay marriage, and gun control. Steckle held the riding narrowly when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives took power in 2006 but didn’t run again in 2008, when thirty-one-year-old Ben Lobb, a member of a prominent Huron County family, won for the Conservatives. Lobb was re-elected by a landslide in 2011.

I was born and raised on a farm near the village of Glammis in the Bruce County part of the riding. I went through school there, and while studying journalism at Carleton University, held my first reporting jobs back home at the weekly Kincardine Independent and Teeswater News. Most of my full-time career in journalism was spent with the Toronto Star. I worked at the newsroom in Toronto from 1987 to 1994 and on Parliament Hill from 1994 to 2003 — essentially the Chrétien era. In 2003, I took up a position as a journalism professor at Carleton but continued to freelance for the Star and wrote a column on immigration issues for it until 2012.

Although I was focused on my journalism career during most of this period, I did briefly contemplate running for the Liberals in Huron-Bruce in the 1993 election. I went as far as to draft a letter addressed to Chrétien, offering myself up as a candidate, and made preliminary contact with the riding association. But in the end, I backed off and stayed in journalism.

Midway through the Stephen Harper decade, I had a sort of personal epiphany. I could no longer stand on the sidelines and watch what Harper was doing to my country.

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