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On a Monday night two weeks before election day, the auditorium in the social housing community on Toronto's West Lodge Avenue is over capacity. Six candidates, each hoping to represent the riding of Parkdale-High Park, are seated across a low stage, facing a couple-hundred-strong crowd.

The audience is a grab bag of ages, ethnicities and classes. There are mobility scooters and eye patches, slickly-dressed young couples and hipsters. The event's host, the Parkdale Residents Association, has a table stacked with information sheets in an assortment of languages, on issues like single parenting, poverty and women's rights. But much of the crowd seems more interested in making life tough for Gerard Kennedy.

The riding's former member of provincial parliament, Mr. Kennedy is still popular in his old stomping grounds. But on this evening many of his answers come in response to pointed questions from the audience. Why have the Liberals so frequently voted in the House of Commons in support of Stephen Harper's Conservative government? Why should voters trust Mr. Kennedy's judgment after he helped install Stéphane Dion as Liberal leader once his own leadership bid failed?

The veteran politician does not appear to be entirely on his game. Several times when he is in mid-answer, microphone held at chest level, audience members have to shout at him to speak up - eliciting quick apologies as he jerks the mic closer to his mouth.

"Are you going to do something about housing? And job creation, and minimum wage?" asks one woman, and as Mr. Kennedy begins to respond with his party's talking points - $600-million for housing, a $10 minimum wage - she interrupts him. "So when is that going to happen? Overnight?" Much of the room erupts in laughter and cheers, led by a few loud people scattered around the room wearing NDP buttons.

The room is most likely stacked with New Democrats, and even so, Mr. Kennedy's contributions are greeted with warm enough applause throughout the night - more of it than is afforded the candidates for the Conservative, Green, Marijuana and Christian Heritage parties. But most attending the meeting save their loudest enthusiasm for the woman sitting to Mr. Kennedy's right.

"You don't have to wonder what I'm going to do in Ottawa," Peggy Nash tells the crowd. "You've seen what I can do in Ottawa, how I've worked with the community, and how I've delivered." The incumbent New Democrat MP reels off an impressive list of accomplishments from her two-and-a-half years in office: saving the Parkdale Food Bank, securing affordable housing funds for Parkdale's Green Phoenix House, being part of the Parkdale Drug Strategy, working to get the deportations of war resisters stayed. "I have stood toe-to-toe with Stephen Harper, and I have won," she says, to raucous cheering.

The bulk of the crowd's queries over the course of the meeting are directed to Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Nash. While the Green Party is fielding an articulate and sensible candidate, and the Conservative nominee is decent and likeable, both are overmatched.

The race here is between the NDP and the Liberals, between one of the most talented rookies of the last parliamentary class and one of the great hopes for the regeneration of the Grits. Whatever choice the voters in Parkdale-High Park make will be read as significant on a national level; in a campaign in which the NDP has tried valiantly to supplant the Liberals as the party of the centre-left, this is perhaps the most fiercely contested battle between the two. And less than a week from election day, nobody has any idea who's going to win.

The old stomping grounds

Parkdale-High Park's heart is in the traditionally working class, Eastern European enclaves of Roncesvalles Village and The Junction. And while those neighbourhoods' identities have become less stark as Toronto has developed, their essential character remains.

Folks in the rest of Canada who think of Toronto as a latter-day Sodom or Gomorrah, however, will find aspects of the riding which fit that image. The city's largest population of psychiatric patients is resident here. Crime and drugs have been consistent problems through the last few decades, as have poverty and homelessness. The Parkdale Community Health Centre runs outreach programs for sex trade workers.

The riding also includes the affluent residential areas around High Park, and its rougher portions are quickly gentrifying as downtown Toronto's development boom spreads. The Queen Street trendiness that had for a time been penned in by the Dufferin Street railway overpass is now spreading quickly west, making the displacement of seniors and low-income residents an electric local issue.

Historically, the riding of Parkdale-High Park and its previous incarnations have sent left-leaning Liberals and New Democrats to Ottawa and Queen's Park. Former federal NDP leader David Lewis won four elections in the old riding of York South; three leaders of the Ontario CCF/NDP, including Bob Rae, also made it their home base.

Mr. Kennedy first won office in York South in a 1996 by-election held after Mr. Rae resigned his seat. A Manitoba native and former director of the Edmonton food bank, he had come to Toronto ten years earlier to run the largest food bank in the country.

He was a high-profile success. Entering politics as a Liberal, he nearly won the provincial party's leadership, was re-elected twice in his riding, and served as education minister under Dalton McGuinty before resigning in 2006 to pursue the leadership of the federal party. With Mr. Kennedy gone, the provincial New Democrats easily recaptured the riding in a by-election that fall.

Peggy Nash had tipped the federal riding of Parkdale-High Park into the NDP's column in the general election at the start of that year. A former labour negotiator and assistant to Buzz Hargrove, it was her second attempt at the seat, and she knocked off three-time Liberal winner Sarmite Bulte. As an MP, Ms. Nash quickly earned a reputation as a hard worker and a fierce advocate for local issues. Appearing at practically every neighbourhood event, she also served as her party's industry critic and, among other initiatives, introduced a bill that would institute a $10 national minimum wage.

"When I first got elected," Ms. Nash says over coffee in her Dundas Street campaign office, "I phoned [Mr. Kennedy] up and said that I looked forward to working with him. I didn't know at that point that he would be a leadership candidate, and I was surprised he decided to come back and run here.

"The day he announced it, I had to stand in the House just before Question Period. I had just learned that he was running, and the Liberals that were in the House started singing, 'Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na' as I was speaking."

Mr. Kennedy had considered running in a riding in Western Canada if he secured the Liberal leadership. When he didn't win, his old fortress of Parkdale-High Park was the obvious choice. By entering the race, he's given a very hard choice to self-described progressive voters who might vacillate between the Liberals and the NDP.

He offers the undecided no apologies. "This is the riding where I have viability as a candidate," Mr. Kennedy says, sitting in a campaign office just 16 doors down from Nash's that's bursting with activity early on a Sunday afternoon. "I'm really keen to keep working with the people who live here, and I don't have to explain about that. The idea that somebody is entitled to this riding is probably a little offensive to some folks out there. I don't think I'm entitled to it and neither is anyone else.

"There are some people at the door who say, 'I wish it wasn't such a tough choice.' From my standpoint, this is where I've worked for ten years. We're proposing ourselves as a rejuvenated Liberal Party that's ready to govern. To govern you have to pick up seats, and this is a seat that I have some potential to win."

Into a sea of orange

It's also a seat Mr. Kennedy has the potential to lose.

This part of the city has become one of the country's principle bastions of NDP strength across levels of government. It was the launching ground for David Miller, Toronto's New Democrat mayor. Incumbent city councillors and school trustees are New Democrats. And the very popular local MPP, Cheri DiNovo, is frequently at Ms. Nash's side - driving her to all-candidates meetings, dropping by the campaign office on a Friday to help out, and appearing alongside her in a photo that graces a campaign leaflet.

An experienced team of NDP organizers have helped secure election for the lot of them, defining a Parkdale-High Park NDP brand in the process. Only a couple of Mr. Kennedy's key election staffers are holdovers from his MPP days.

Across the riding, there seems to be at least one Nash sign for every Kennedy sign. And while both candidates pointedly avoid negative comments about the other in conversation, in their literature, on the doorstep and on the stump, their styles are a study in contrast.

Daybreak on a Wednesday morning finds Mr. Kennedy and a handful of supporters on the corner of one of The Junction's busy intersections, equipped with signs from the three eras of the candidate's political life: fresh red signs from this campaign, tall vertical "KENNEDY" signs from the Liberal leadership convention, and two big, battered 3' by 5' signs leaning against lampposts, souvenirs of his first provincial campaign that he hauled out of his shed for the "morning wave."

Mr. Kennedy, wearing a suit without necktie, organizes his backers to stand behind him and brandish their signs while he waves at commuting traffic, shakes hands with passing cyclists and pedestrians, and lets himself be seen. He leads the group back and forth on the corner, walking with the easy gait of a former athlete. "Nice, easy movements," he tells his young supporters. "We don't want to wake anybody up. We'll just filter into their consciousness." A taxi pulls over and Mr. Kennedy waves him on. "Always the tricky part, not getting cabs to stop," he grins.

Cars honk, passers-by take pamphlets. Mr. Kennedy chats with them about Stephen Harper. A man on a bicycle stops to talk about bike lanes. After he leaves, the candidate explains to one of his helpers who at the city they would approach about the issue.

That Friday morning outside a Junction public school, Ms. Nash and school trustee Irene Atkinson are bundled up against the autumn chill as they greet parents arriving to drop off their children. A pair of volunteers covers the school's other entrance. All four are distributing a letter from Ms. Atkinson endorsing the candidate. "I'm Peggy Nash and this is a message from your school trustee," she says, greeting each parent and child with a smile.

A woman approaches with her seven-year-old daughter for a handshake. "Alex," the mother says, "remember when I was talking to you about the election? This is the woman I was talking about."

One parent asks Ms. Nash to look into a local synagogue that's using security officers armed with semi-automatic weapons, and another parent joins the conversation. "I understand the need for security," he says. "But Peggy, it's not Canadian." Ms. Nash agrees to talk to the folks at the synagogue.

A few little girls on the school side of the fence wave at her and yell, "Hi, Peggy" Ms. Nash smiles as the last few stragglers arrive just before the bell. "That was like me," she says, "come dashing in right before nine."

At the all-candidates meeting at West Lodge Avenue, and again the next night in the auditorium of a Catholic high school (before a less diverse, better-appointed crowd), Ms. Nash pushes all the local issue buttons. "You know me. I'm from this community," she says, a constant refrain for her. "And you can trust my judgment."

She reels off another formidable list of local programs secured and facilities fought for. And while her local bona fides are flawless, the accomplishment she's most proud of is of a larger scale: helping to stop the purchase by foreign interests of the aerospace company MacDonald Dettwiler.

Mr. Kennedy knows his local issues, particularly pushing the idea of a Parkdale Economic Development Agency, and speaks ably about the roles that all three levels of government have to play in solving problems for the community. It's the least one would expect from someone who as an MPP had a reputation around Queen's Park for near-obsessive attention to detail over what was happening in his riding, even after he assumed the workload of a demanding cabinet portfolio. But he seems to come most fully to life when he's challenged about the state of his party, or given an opportunity to expound on a big issue facing the country.

"We can't let Stephen Harper do to Canada what Mike Harris did to Ontario," he implores, and his passion draws whoops and applause. After the debate, a trio of elderly Filipino women working the Conservative candidate's information table approach Mr. Kennedy for autographed copies of his brochures.

'I don't know what to think any more'

Plenty of voters seem to have yet to decide. And with a week to go until election day, with gaffes still possible for any candidate or party and the economy seemingly worsening by the hour, there will still be plenty that could change minds.

On Friday morning, Ms. Nash knocks on the Vine Street door of Amy Mulhern. The mother of a three-year-old, she's just lost her job with a U.S. energy company as a result of the current economic turmoil. Ms. Nash sympathizes, and they chat about the economy.

After the candidate moves on to the next door, Ms. Mulhern muses on how she'll vote. She and her partner voted for Ms. Nash in 2006, but this time she's undecided. "I just got laid off," she says. "I don't know what to think any more. I'm just kind of stunned with everything that's happened to me and I'm not really sure what to do.

"I don't like the Conservatives. I don't necessarily like what they stand for, and I've never voted for them in the past. But at the same time I can say that I don't think that Stephen Harper has done a horrible job. I know in this community the NDP does have a very active presence, and that impresses me. I do tend to vote Liberal, but at the same time I really dislike Stéphane Dion. He drives me a little bit crazy."

As much as she admires Ms. Nash, she thinks Mr. Kennedy, too, is pretty great. Ms. Mulhern points across the street at a playground with fences that abut a set of railroad tracks. "He built us this park. He came out when he was an MPP and met with all the parents and asked us what we wanted to see in this park for our children. He really made a difference.

"I really feel that the politicians in this area take an interest in the community and follow up on their words. Which you don't get to see very often."

Special to The Globe