Liberals get aggressive to win — and keep — important Ottawa ridings

In the first nine days of this election campaign, Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne has been in Ottawa twice and her team has targeted the PC candidate in a west-end riding as many times.

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After the riding-rich Toronto area, Ottawa may be the Liberals' most important region. Five of the previous seven ridings are Grit red, and the party — currently ranking third in the polls — needs to keep those seats if it has any chance of not being decimated on election day June 7.

That's why Wynne was promoting "the relentless Ottawa team" that "gets things done" at a news conference Thursday morning in the city's LRT maintenance facility, reminding the public about the $1 billion-plus Liberals have poured into rapid transit. 

And if the Liberals can pick up one of the two new ridings in play this election, which insiders concede is a long shot, then all the better. That's why she was in the new riding of Kanata–​Carleton Wednesday evening to speak at an Iftar dinner hosted by Kanata's Muslim community.

She rounded out her time in the capital Thursday by appearing on CBC Radio's Ontario Today before getting on the bus headed for Kingston, Ont.

Second time here in as many weeks

Wynne held her first official rally of the campaign in Ottawa–Vanier, possibly the safest Liberal riding in the province, and is back a week later.

PC Leader Doug Ford was also in the Ottawa area when the writ was drawn — he spoke at a trades conference in Gatineau, Que., and later held a rally in Renfrew, about an hour west of Ottawa — and his team says he'll be back this way at some point over the next three weeks.

The NDP's Andrea Horwath is expected to visit Ottawa for the first time during this campaign on the upcoming long weekend. She will likely spend all her time in Ottawa Centre, the only riding where the NDP have a chance of unseating someone, in this case well-known Liberal incumbent Yasir Naqvi. 

Campaign insiders say they are hearing a lot of uncertainty at the door, and that people are torn about how to vote. They'd like change, but some are wary of Ford's platform that, so far, doesn't explain where cost savings will come from to pay for his promises, while others aren't convinced Horwath is up to the task of governing.

Wynne trying to soften switch

In a riding like Ottawa West–Nepean, where voters came within about 1,000 votes of electing a Tory, Wynne is hoping to soften that switch to the PCs. There's some indication in the polls, as well as anecdotal evidence on the campaign trail, that while there appears to be support for the Tory party, momentum for the leader himself isn't on the upswing. So expect to see Wynne take aim at Ford himself as opposed to the PC party in general.

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And while Wynne is trying to help her team keep their Ottawa seats, her party is also trying to pick up one of the two new ridings. Just before the election officially began, the Liberal government announced a $50-million extension of the north-south Trillium Line into Riverside South, a burgeoning community that also happens to be in the new Carleton riding.

While the NDP and PCs have both committed to funding the second phase of the LRT project, neither has specifically commented yet on the additional $50-million extension.

Liberals aggressively pursuing Kanata–Carleton

The Liberals' fight for the other new riding of Kanata–Carleton is even more overt.

The party has twice raised questions about PC candidate Merrilee Fullerton. Last week, four Ottawa Liberal candidates gathered to allege that some years-old tweets from Fullerton, who is a medical doctor, suggested she's in favour of privatizing some parts of health care. Fullerton responded online that she's "100 per cent committed to Ontario's public health care system."

And earlier this week, the Liberal campaign called for Ford to drop Fullerton as a candidate, after tweets from 2015 surfaced in which Fullerton, among other things, questioned whether parents could feel comfortable sending their children to school "under the authority of a masked teacher," followed by the hashtag "niqab."

In a statement released Wednesday evening, Fullerton wrote that as a physician, she "served people in our community from all walks of life, religions and cultures for 26 years. My core values have always been to serve and respect all people."

Around the time that statement came out, Wynne — without mentioning Fullerton by name — was speaking to a room of Muslims, warning against divisive rhetoric on social media and suggesting that "if this election comes down to a choice between an inclusive society and a divisive society, we need to opt for that inclusive society."

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The conventional wisdom is that Kanata–Carleton will go Tory blue, as much of the riding is made up of former Carleton–Mississippi Mills, which had been Conservative.

But the Liberals have reason, however slim, to hope they could take the riding. After all, they won this same riding in the 2015 federal election.

As well, the former MPP for the area is Jack MacLaren, who was kicked out by the PCs and is running in the new riding under the Trillium Party banner. MacLaren still has some loyal followers in the area, and Liberals are hoping the PC and Trillium parties will split the right-of-centre vote.

And hence the hard sell on Kanata–Carleton.

It's a stretch, but in this election, with the Liberals trailing in the polls, they need to hope every long-shot bet they place will pay off big.