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St. Paul’s by-election wrap up

Teflon premier, blah blah blah.

Media pundits are trying to figure out how the good doctor, Liberal Eric Hoskins, was able to so easily beat back challenges (I use that word loosely) by Tory Sue-Ann Levy and Dipper Julian Heller in yesterday’s byelection in St. Paul’s.

In the final tally, Hoskins bested his closest challenger Levy by a two to one margin, some 13,800 votes to Levy’s 7,000 and change.

Levy, the Sun columnist with a hate-on for “socialists,” thought she had an issue to run on – the Liberal’s plan to introduce a harmonized sales tax, aka HST. When in doubt, go for the lowest common denominator. St. Paul’s, though, is not your run-of-mill riding. The voters, highly-educated and mostly well-heeled, are not easily impressed by politicians touting the same-old bag of electoral tricks. They like their political candidates polished and well-groomed, anointed by their predecessors and brought through the ranks. See former MPP Michael Bryant.

The HST was never going to be a winning issue for the Tories, since it’s their cousins in Ottawa who forced it down Ontario’s throat in the first place. Besides, the HST is good for business.

Levy’s stunt-laden campaign – she pulled Bad Boy Mel Lastman out of retirement to go mainstreeting the other day – bordered on the comical. Her daily blogs tried to make Hoskins out to be a sushi-eating snob. But the only ones who seemed to be taking Levy’s candidacy seriously were the odd scribes in the media eager to make a race of it.

Hoskins didn’t even bother showing up to most of the all-candidates meetings. He didn’t have to. It didn’t matter, either, that Hoskins doesn’t live in the riding and couldn’t even vote for himself. Such a foregone conclusion was this one that not even the Election Prediction Project, the online clearing house for all things electoral, bothered to follow the non-contest.

The Tories are trying to put on a brave face, talking now about running Levy municipally in the riding against Michael Walker. But the defeat has to hurt. The party actually thought they had a wiener, er, winner, in Levy, simply because she happens to be Jewish and lesbian to boot.

She may wear a skirt from time to time, but there’s no progressive in Levy’s brand of conservatism. For a party trying to soften its image under newly-anointed Harris acolyte Tim Hudak, her candidacy proved a cheap trick, a mere distraction. The early returns on Hudak’s guns and property rights hordes are in. As long as they remained married to the Harris past, they don’t stand a chance.

For the NDP, the returns in St. Paul’s may be even more disconcerting than for the Tories. Trial lawyer Julian Heller, the party’s standard-bearer, has lived in the riding for 25 years and is actively involved in education issues. It’s the third time he’s made a go of it in St. Paul’s. Name recognition wasn’t the problem. The party’s focus on HST clearly was.

By hitching themselves to the HST bandwagon and not differentiating themselves from the Tories, the NDP made a fatal flaw. Whatever happened to all that talk about the new green economy anyway? [rssbreak]

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