Provincial Election
 

Wanted to start this thread about the upcoming Ontario election coming this fall but probably many know that our good old buddy Randell Danley is running for the PC against Bob Chiarelli.



Citizen columnist ‘gets involved’; Randall Denley to run for Tories in provincial election


By TOM SPEARS and Lee Greenberg May 17, 2011 3:01 PM Comments (10)



Randall Denley joins Tim Hudak to announce Denley’s candidacy for the Ontario Conservative Party in the riding of Ottawa West-Nepean.
Photograph by: Chris Mikula, The Ottawa Citizen

Citizen columnist Randall Denley confirmed Tuesday that he’ll seek a Conservative nomination in next fall’s provincial election, saying he’s following his advice to others — to get involved.

“As a newspaper columnist you can say: ‘Other people should do this, other people should do that.’ You can’t really do anything yourself,” he told reporters.

“If you’re going to make a difference, you have to get involved in the process.”

It was a hard decision, he said: “I think the election in Ottawa West-Nepean is going to be a lot more fun to write about than to participate in.”

He called incumbent Liberal Bob Chiarelli “a tough opponent,” but wouldn’t comment on him otherwise.

Denley said Ontario faces rising energy costs and the expenses of the HST. These are job killers for young people and they erode the savings of older people, he said, and these are the issues that drew him to the campaign.

“People who have followed my writing over the last 19 years know that I fight for taxpayers. Now I want to take that fight to a new arena at Queen’s Park,” he said.

A date for the nomination meeting has not yet been set.

Party leader Tim Hudak called Denley “a star candidate,” and said the party leaders have discussed their support of Denley with others who might have entered the nomination race.

“It certainly was conveyed to (other) candidates that there was a star candidate in the race. It was very well received,” he said.

Hudak said the other potential candidates are supporting Denley. The provincial Liberals put out a statement saying Hudak forced them to step aside.

Denley is taking a leave until the election, and would quit the paper if he wins. He has been on staff since 1983.

Running for office “is something that people have often suggested to me, but it’s something I never really pursued,” he said. “I think this is a unique opportunity. I think we have a strong party, I think we do need to make change in Ontario, and I want to be part of that change.”

Asked about local issues in the riding, he said they tend to be the same as the provincial ones — taxes and energy costs.

Chiarelli, who serves as infrastructure minister in Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet, said Denley would make an “interesting” candidate.

“I welcome Randall to the race and look forward to the opportunity to engage in a very interesting debate,” he said late Monday night.

Chiarelli added he will look to Denley to clarify Hudak’s ambiguous policy stances on issues like full-day kindergarten and the unpopular harmonized sales tax. Tories have opposed both measures but are unclear on whether they would scrap them, said Chiarelli. Denley has written in his column that the HST is good for businesses.

“I’m hoping the candidate will be willing to answer those questions that Tim Hudak refuses to answer,” Chiarelli said.

The provincial Liberals, meanwhile, are pointing to what they say is a contradiction in Tory policy. In appointing Denley, Hudak overrode an open nomination process in Ottawa West-Nepean, effectively shelving the candidacies of three lesser-known figures. Hudak refused to do the same in Carleton-Mississippi Mills, where, earlier this year, libertarian upstart Jack MacLaren challenged — and eventually triumphed over — veteran MPP Norm Sterling to win the nomination.

Premier Dalton McGuinty was asked about Denley’s entry into the race Tuesday morning.

“I welcome anyone from any background who chooses to enter into the race as a candidate,” he told reporters. “You know, there is so much cynicism felt for politics and political institutions. And, as I say, I welcome anybody who chooses to get involved … And I know that Mr. Chiarelli, in particular, welcomes the competition.”

Hudak called Denley “one of Ontario’s finest journalists.”
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

An interesting point about Norm Sterling, but really, he is a poor fit for the riding. The rural parts of Carleton-Mississippi Mills are Tea Party-dominated, and Kanata is not exactly a liberal enclave either. The big problem might be after the next redistribution since Hillier and MacLaren may fight over nominations if Lanark County is reunited (presumably with more of rural Ottawa, but not Kanata).

The sell by date for Norm Sterling has long expired. Anybody I know who has tried to get hold of him to try and assist them with an issue has had frustrations with him...he tends to disappear. His sense of entitlement and indignation that his nomination for the riding would be challenged could have been his undoing. However, the one issue of Jack Maclaren will be a scary proposition if he gets in.

All I can think of when I imagine the Carleton Lands Group is Farmer Palmer from the Viz comics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Palmer

Get off my land.:banana:

The funny part is that the current riding, Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, is one of the biggest-by-population ridings around - about 120,000 - so assuming that a "Lanark-Carleton" riding is reformed from the Lanark parts of L-F-LA and Carleton-Mississippi Mills and the "Carleton" parts of C-MM, then the Frontenac-Lennox and Addington parts of L-F-LA would remain as an open rural riding. One of them might want to move...

Randall Denley has single-handedly ruined this city for decades. Now he wants to spread his path of destruction all the way to Queen's Park. Ugh. No thanks.

While i am not a supporter of danley i don't see how any any way he has ruined the city.

Denley's only been at the Citizen for 23 years, and 18 as a columnist. I'm afraid that Ottawa had been ruined long before Denley showed up in either capacity.

Had the City paid attention to his critiques of the N-S LRT in the years leading up to it, we might well have been better off. I can't see how he'd make any worse a representative than Bob Chiarelli.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/columni...ll_Denley.html

Randall Denley has been examining local and provincial issues for the Citizen for 23 years, first as city editor, and for the last 18 years as city columnist. His focus is on how government spends your money.

... just in case the Citizen deletes his bio...

I am sorry but Randall Denley is one of the key people who banged the drum loudly that has created the current LRT mess. He is strongly in favour of the mega-dig, which may prove unaffordable and send us back to the drawing board yet again and this is the reason why we have only built more busways in the last 5 years.

Such a sunny, optimistic perspective.

All true, but I still agree with him. I want a very good system, not an mediocre one. If we aim for mediocre then we'll probably end up with craptastic.

I really question Tim Hudak's plan of tax cuts and elimination of the deficit. He has submitted a plan to cut the budget by 2% per year over the 4 year term. This sounds pretty doable doesn't it? Then you consider that health care and education spending will not be affected. This represents 75% of the provincial spending. Now lets consider inflation at 2% per year, which I believe is a reasonable assumption. That means that real government services will have to be cut by 4% per year to achieve a 2% dollar saving. Over a 4 year period, this works out about a 17% cut when considering compounding of interest. But Tim Hudak has committed that this cut will not apply to health care and education. So to achieve a 17% saving on the total budget but applying it to only items in 25% of the budget means that most or all government services beyond health care and education will have to be gutted. A 17% saving on the total budget applied to items representing only 25% of the budget means a cut of over 50% on those items. This will apply to provincial highways, provincial parks, provincial funding of transit projects, provincial jails and whatever is not covered by education and health care. What appears pretty easy to achieve on the surface is actually scary when you look at it in these terms.

I do hope some of my assumptions are incorrect but when you consider that Mike Harris filled in an under construction Eglinton subway tunnel, could that not also happen to Ottawa's tunnel plan given the degree of spending cuts that might be needed to achieve Tim Hudak's spending plan? It is time to pin Tim Hudak and Randall Denley and other Conservative candidates down and get them to commit that they will not renege on the $600 million funding of Ottawa's LRT project over the next 4 years.

It's time to not elect a corporate-Conservative provincial government.

What party do you support? The Liberal and NDP platforms aren't exactly very left-wing (i.e. to union levels) either...

Education is filled with waste and mismanagement, and enrolment is declining. I'd rather see education privatized partially or fully than most of those other programs cut.

How so? It's quite easy to make these broad claims, but less easy to identify specific cuts to be made.

Since the vast majority of the education budget goes to teachers, materials and facilities, how do you propose to make significant cuts without increasing class sizes or forcing students to pay for more of their own materials or reducing the quality of facilities available to students? None of those sound very appealing to me. If anything, we should be increasing our spending on education, and in particular our universities. The nations we will need to compete with certainly are doing that, and shortsighted cuts to education budgets will have a long term impact on our competitiveness as a country.

Fortunately,privatizing a public good like education will never fly, because a) very few people want their kids to be treated as profit centres, b) it is really unlikely that there are any significant savings to be realized by streamlining administration, and c) people are generally quite satisfied with our current education system (as they should be), whereas systems with more privatization (i.e. the US) show demonstrably poorer results on balance.

The one area where I do see waste is in the amount of busing that goes on. We are supposed to be encouraging our kids to be active, and then we bus them 600 m to school. Of course that is the one significant part of the system that is already privatized.

Combining Catholic and (edit) public boards could produce savings...It's unfair to fund one religion and not others, and based on John Tory's experience (and Ernie Eves before him..) there doesn't seem to be an appetite to fund private religious education.

My concern with that is it would open the flood gates for religion at schools.

I would agree with you in combining the school boards...it seems silly in many neighbourhoods to have 4 sets of school buses zooming around 1/2 empty, 4 sets of admin staff, 4 HQ's, 4 separate groups fighting for Development Charge fees and to be brutally honest I've met many parents and students in the non-public school board that don't appear to be the most devout people in the world.

When I've described the system that we have here to people from other areas they can't believe that the public funds get split so many ways.

I would wholeheartedly seriously consider a political party that would have the guts to propose a fusion of the school boards. I feel that many people privately are willing to look at it but politically it is a hot potato.

How so if the Catholic school system is eliminated? I do agree that 4 school boards are too many, it should be 1 (the French boards should be eliminated as well and merged into one system).

I am definitely in favour of a voucher system where the parents have the full decisions though. All public schools would be under one board.

Both Newfoundland and Quebec have managed to wipe out their religious (public) boards.

Ontario can do the same.

Though in fairness, Ontario's Catholic Boards are very large in some communities.

I think I might be inclined to try to merge French-Catholic and French Public first, as these would produce some fairly large incremental savings (being smaller boards with 2 HQs etc.) while effecting a relatively small number of voters.

It would also have the effect of dramatically improving access to French language education if you kept most (not all) of the schools open