With two neck-and-neck progressive candidates who’ve each served the riding before, what’s a Parkdale-High Park voter to do?
Look to their records, one supposes. And that’s exactly where things are getting politely testy between the NDP’s Peggy Nash and Liberal incumbent Gerard Kennedy, who beat Nash by about 7 per cent in the last election.
Both are self-avowed progressives with strong roots in a riding so lefty that the Conservative candidate there calls himself an environmentalist, and where the Christian Heritage hopeful is an oddball thespian/stand-up comic/pharmacist.
Both Nash and Kennedy have represented Parkdale-High Park before. Nash took the riding in 2006 from Lib Sarmite Bulte and lost it to Kennedy in 2008 by 4,000 votes. Both lead candidates worked on food bank issues, campaigned to electrify the diesel trains soon to run though the riding, and have national clout within their parties.
In light of the recent national NDP surge, the riding could easily go either way. But without standout differences in their parties’ platforms, it’s coming down to a contest of who can convince voters he or she has worked harder for the riding. And what a tangle this is.
On her website and throughout her campaign, Nash has repeated claims that Kennedy is a Parliament absentee, missing 122 of 363 House of Commons votes since he took office. Kennedy’s camp says those numbers don’t tell the full story, since Parliament’s ledgers don’t distinguish if he abstained from a vote or was away from his seat.
The accusations also fail to account for vote pairing, a Parliamentary tradition in which two members who would have taken opposite stances on a vote agree to abstain or be absent. Kennedy says he was present at 272 votes and paired 32, making his attendance record slightly better than Nash’s.
A scholarly-looking former provincial education minister and one-time Liberal leadership hopeful, Kennedy has fielded criticism about his lack of presence in the riding. He brushes such comments aside, saying his political style is to work quietly to get things done rather than make a big show.
Kennedy once represented a section of the riding as MPP and his reps say he draws support ranges from social housing residents to the those in the riding’s more affluent areas.
Nash, once a high-level negotiator for the CAW, styles herself as having close ties to the community – she’s lived there for 25 years – while getting things done in the House. As MP, she secured $300,000 for an affordable housing project in Parkdale, worked on the campaign to save the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles and helped build the Parkdale Community Food Bank.
In Parliament, she made waves in the successful fight to prevent a U.S. arms manufacturer from taking over the Canadian maker of the Canadarm, introduced a motion that prevented a Conservative fundraiser from getting responsibility for making government appointments and was a loud voice in the fight to cap ATM and credit card interest rates.
Kennedy’s record in Parliament is less striking but not without its merits. A private member’s bill he tabled in September 2009 to prevent the deportation of war resisters did not pass leader Michael Ignatieff was one of more than a dozen MPs who walked out just before the vote.
But earlier that year, while Liberal industry critic, he introduced a successful motion to stop the Conservative government from giving a disproportionate amount of infrastructure money to ridings held by its own MPs, resulting in an additional $150 million pledged to Toronto transit projects. He also organized the opposition hearings that continued while Parliament was prorogued for several months in early 2010.
In the riding, Kennedy claims to have stopped the deafeningly loud pile drivers used in GO’s track build project. He also says he saved a Junction post office from closure and organized regular community forums.
So while both have lots going for them, they also share the same Achilles heel, according to U of T policy specialist Akaash Maharaj. That is the perception that both have wider agendas, meaning Kennedy’s possible leadership ambitions and Nash’s role as NDP president. “Some feel both candidates have aspirations outside of the riding,” he says.
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