Get ready to ride the rails, Ottawa. And we may finally stop raw sewage from flowing into the Ottawa River.
With a startling Liberal majority — and all of the local Liberal MPPs hanging onto their seats — Ottawans will be on Premier Kathleen Wynne to keep her word on funding the second phase of light rail to the tune of almost $1 billion, as well as the $65 million needed from the province for the final stage of the Ottawa River Action Plan in the coming year.
Mayor Jim Watson wasted no time in reminding the premier about her campaign pledges. Just an hour after the polls closed at 9 p.m. Thursday night, Watson congratulated Wynne and said he looked forward to working “with her government on key Ottawa priorities such as cleaning up the Ottawa River and extending light rail transit farther east, west and south.”
At no time in recent memory has Ottawa mattered so much in a provincial election.
This was particularly true for the Progressive Conservatives. They needed to win ridings like Ottawa West-Nepean and Ottawa-Orléans if they had any chance of forming a government.
Taking Ottawa West-Nepean from Liberal MPP and Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli would have been especially sweet, as rising hydro prices appears to have been the most talked-about issue at the doorstep.
Ottawa South was also considered in play — and would have been considered a coup, as the riding has been the stomping ground of the McGuinty clan for close to 30 years — but it was considered harder to topple. The local ridings did go the way of the party — just not the way the Conservatives were hoping for.
Former Citizen columnist Randall Denley of Ottawa West-Nepean and Andrew Lister of Ottawa-Orléans both lost their second elections, having also been unsuccessful in 2011. Matt Young of Ottawa South ran previously in last summer’s byelection, losing to former premier Dalton McGuinty’s longtime aide, John Fraser.
“We failed you as a party this time,” Young said. “Not just me. We failed Ontario this time.”
The importance of these Ottawa ridings to the Conservative cause was why PC leader Tim Hudak was in Ottawa so often, frequently visiting the capital even before the writ was dropped.
He was here the day after the Liberals released their big-spending budget, where a planned town-hall type meeting with local candidates morphed into an impromptu campaign stop when it became clear we were being plunged into an election.
Even late in the campaign, Hudak was in Ottawa twice in as many weeks, although his quick return was to conduct damage control after telling local reporters last week that a PC government would not fund the second phase of the city’s light-rail expansion.
“We can’t afford it,” Hudak said originally — and seemingly definitively. On the same day, Watson released the results of a questionnaire to the leaders about where they stand on Ottawa-specific issues.
Hudak had sent a form letter explaining the Million Jobs Plan. Together with his seeming refusal to fund Phase 2 of LRT, Hudak’s boilerplate response was seen as dismissive of Ottawa.
But the PC leader was quick to make up for the error, sending the mayor a new response on Saturday.
On Monday, he said his government would fund LRT — but not until the budget is balanced in 2016. (The second phase of LRT has always been scheduled to start in 2018, well after the PCs promise to eliminate the deficit.)
Apart from the Million Jobs math bungle — which was a campaign-wide error — Hudak’s original statement on not funding the LRT was the worst moment for the local PC candidates. Whether Hudak’s LRT slip contributed to his party’s loss in Ottawa West-Nepean, Ottawa-Orléans and Ottawa South is hard to say, although it certainly would not have helped.
To be fair, all the PC candidates would have personally fought for LRT funding if they’d been elected. How much influence they would have had in a PC government is now a moot point.
Local New Democrats, on the other hand, hardly laid eyes on their leader. We haven’t had an NDP MPP in Ottawa for about two decades — that was Evelyn Gigantes who lost her Ottawa Centre seat in 1995 — and the fact the New Democrats didn’t stand a chance in Eastern Ontario must have accounted for Andrea Horwath almost-total absence from the local hustings.
She did touch down in Ottawa to give a lunchtime speech organized by the Canada 2020 think tank, but Horwath’s team couldn’t make time to sit down with the Citizen’s editorial board during the six-week campaign (nor could they arrange for a talk with us by conference call).
Nor did the leader personally seem up on Ottawa’s major issues. On a radio talk show this week, Horwath said she couldn’t “say yes at this point” about funding the LRT, and did not seem to fully understand the question.
Perhaps that’s understandable. Horwath was fighting for her and her party’s political life, so why waste time in ridings where the shots were longer than the odds of the NDP taking power?
The Liberals were somewhere in the middle in terms of how important Ottawa was to their success. This city has been Liberal-red for some time — except, of course, for the Tory stronghold of Nepean-Carleton, held by senior PC MPP Lisa MacLeod since 2005, who handily won her seat again this time out.
Naturally, the Liberals wanted to win as many seats as possible, but hanging onto power wasn’t necessarily contingent on holding onto all their current Ottawa seats. But Ottawa ridings were certainly key in winning the unexpected majority the Liberals pulled off Thursday night.
jchianello@ottawacitizen.com
