80
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.
Related Articles
Photogallery
Internet Links
- Election 2.0: Globe stories, photos, graphics, quizzes, interactives, columns, opinion, games and more
- Send us: Your election photos, videos and political cartoons
- The lighter side: Best from The Globe's cartoonists
- Who's ahead: Poll of Polls
- Twitter: Get breaking news and commentary from Globe politics
"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.
