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In eastern Ontario, Liberals and Progressive Conservatives seem to be spending as much time campaigning against Toronto as each other.

It's the national political dynamic, writ small.

As they compete for voters' affections in the Oct. 10 election, the two main contenders in the region are hurling the usual invective over the usual issues: Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty's broken promises, Conservative Leader John Tory's ill-received pledge to fund faith-based schools.

But in eastern Ontario, there's an added epithet applied to both leaders: Toronto-centric.

Never mind that Mr. McGuinty is a local boy, born and raised in the nation's capital. Never mind that he represents Ottawa South, a family fiefdom previously represented at the Ontario legislature by his father and currently represented in Parliament by his brother, David.

Conservatives contend that Mr. McGuinty has forgotten his roots since becoming premier four years ago, forsaking the region to worship instead at the electoral altar of almighty Toronto.

They recite a litany of neglect: 10 of Mr. McGuinty's ministers are from the Greater Toronto Area, only four from eastern Ontario and only one of them has any heft at the cabinet table. Mr. McGuinty produces a budget aimed at rebuilding crumbling infrastructure in the province and two-thirds of the cash goes to the GTA. He unveils a plan for boosting public transit in Ontario and it's almost exclusively focused on the GTA.

"He's supposed to be the member from Ottawa, but [he's] rarely in Ottawa. He lives in Toronto in a taxpayer-funded mansion in Forest Hill. He gets $75 hair cuts," said Bob Runciman, the veteran Conservative member and former cabinet minister who's held the eastern Ontario riding of Leeds-Grenville since 1981.

"He's gotten away from eastern Ontario."

Rubbish, counter the Liberals. If anyone neglected the region it was the Conservatives under former premier Mike Harris. Mr. McGuinty's Liberals have repaired much of the damage and put the region back on the map, they say.

"People around here have a good and long memory of how we were treated under the previous government," says Jim Watson, Mr. McGuinty's health promotion minister, who's running for re-election in Ottawa West-Nepean.

"Eastern Ontario really was treated as some sort of a backwater community."

With only 14 of the province's 107 ridings, eastern Ontario may not have the political clout of vote-rich Toronto. But Mr. Watson insists the region is now getting its fair share of government attention and largesse.

But the Liberal message could prove a harder sell in the region's seven primarily rural ridings that stretch along Hwy. 401 from Port Hope to Cornwall, west through the Ottawa Valley and on into Haliburton's cottage country.

The Conservatives are trying to shake the Liberal hold on four of those ridings, contending that the Toronto-fixated Grits have no understanding of rural sensibilities. The attack is personified in Randy Hillier — the controversial Conservative candidate in the new riding of Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington — whose campaign literature proclaims: "There's more to Ontario than just Toronto."

Liberals like to characterize Mr. Hillier, an organizer of tractor blockades on the 401 and farm protests in Ottawa, as a gun-toting, homophobic, right-wing Neanderthal.

Conservatives counter that Liberal ridicule only reinforces the perception that the Grits are a bunch of politically correct, urban sophisticates who wouldn't know a chicken from a cow.

"I think Hillier's going to win that riding," Mr. Runciman said. "He's looked upon as someone who's going to speak out and stand up for people who feel in many respects voiceless at Queen's Park and outnumbered. That has some resonance with people."

Agriculture Minister Leona Dombrowsky, who's carrying the Liberal banner in the neighbouring riding of Prince Edward-Hastings, acknowledges that rural voters in the region have some unique concerns about the shortage of doctors, the lack of economic development opportunities and deteriorating infrastructure.

But she contends the McGuinty government has been sensitive to those concerns, establishing family health teams, earmarking $80 million over four years for an economic development fund and increasing the province's spending on agriculture in each of its budgets.

Whatever the Liberal shortcomings, the Conservatives have no credibility on rural issues, Watson said.

"John Tory prancing around in a barn yard is not believable. He is Mr. Downtown Toronto and quite frankly doesn't have a lot of credibility in rural Ontario."