Before we move onto the first in a series of Ontario catchups, there are a few follow-ups to note from our earlier catchups in Québec and the Atlantic.

• Charlottetown, PE - Educator Donna Profit won the contested nomination over retired RCMP officer Robert Campbell last Friday, November 27, and will now carry the Conservative banner against four-term Liberal M.P. Shawn Murphy. Already nominated for the Green Party is arts administrator Corin McFadden. No NDP candidates have been nominated anywhere on the Island as yet, although this was the riding where they obtained their only second place finish in recent Island history in 1997 under former candidate, lawyer Dolores (Dodi) Crane. Since 2000 when he was first elected to replace former Liberal M.P. George Proud with 42% of the vote, Murphy has polled 50% or better on election day.
  
• West Nova, NS - The next day, New Democrats met in Digby to formalize the nomination of their new candidate, Andrew Baxter, who will now join first-time Conservative M.P. Greg Kerr, former Liberal M.P. Robert Thibault who was renominated at the beginning of October, and a Green to be named later. After coming within 512 votes of defeating Thibault in 2006 (2.3 votes per poll or 1.1% of the vote), Kerr returned in 2008, holding more of his vote than Thibault could, and defeating him in the process. The riding has always been a Liberal-Conservative two-way contest, with a reasonably constant third-place vote-share for the NDP, and typically fairly evenly matched campaign spending between the two lead candidates. Even in the recent provincial election that elected an NDP government province-wide, 4/6 of the provincial ridings within this riding's borders returned Liberals and 2/6 returned Conservatives. So, it will likely see direct combat between the two main challengers, now entering their third match against one another.
  
• Halifax, NS - First-time NDP M.P. Megan Leslie was renominated in her riding the next night (Sunday, November 29), where she'll be facing Liberal candidate Stan Kutcher who won a nomination contest last fall, along with first-time Green candidate Anthony Rosborough, and a Conservative to be named later. Leslie maintained most of former NDP M.P. Alexa McDonough's raw vote in the last election, but saw her opponents' strength equalize somewhat as the Liberal vote fell and turnout dropped. Neither major opponent matched Leslie's campaign spending either (she spent 91% of the limit, to the Liberals' 54% and the Conservatives' 71%).
• Joliette, QC - Bloc Québécois House Leader Pierre Paquette was also to have been renominated on Sunday, for the fifth time in his case, in this north-shore riding which he has always won with 50-60% of the vote. He will face returning 2008 candidates Suzie St-Onge for the Liberals, and Francine Raynault for the NDP. No Conservative candidate has or Green candidates have surfaced as yet. MORNING POST-COFFEE UPDATE: 2008 Green candidate Annie Durette has been renominated. Sorry, Ms. Durette.
  
• Laval – Les Îles, QC - A sixth NDP candidate has now been officially nominated in Québec, as Laval municipal workers' union vice-president François Pilon was acclaimed on Saturday, November 28. This is Pilon's fourth run for the NDP, although his first in a Laval riding (he previously ran in Honoré-Mercier from 2004-08).
  
  With the arrival of Jack Layton as NDP leader, the decision of a number of FTQ activists to run for the NDP in 2004, while others were running for the Bloc Québécois, put the FTQ (Fédération des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Québec) into a difficult situation, such that it took pains to clarify that it endorsed neither party, but supported its members who were running for office, and recognized that as a labour central, some of its member unions were supporting each of the parties directly. It was interesting to read, as part of NDP backroomer Brian Topp's series this week on last year's coalition negotiations, that it was the FTQ which had facilitated discussions between Layton and the Bloc early in the Fall of 2008 about replacing the Conservative government (Topp himself has a grounding in the party's Québec strategy, being fluently bilingual and a former organizer and aide for one-time NDP M.P. Phil Edmonston).
  
  Many of the NDP's candidates in the last campaign originated from the house of labour, including candidates from the CEP (e.g., recent Hochelaga by-election candidate Jean-Claude Rocheleau), CUPE, the Postal Workers and Steelworkers. Meanwhile, the Québec wing of the Autoworkers strongly supports the Bloc Québécois (something the Liberal Party may not have realized when it played footsie with former CAW President Buzz Hargrove in 2006), and it has provided them with a number of candidates, as has the CSN labour central, the electrical workers, and the fraternity of forestry and manufacturing workers among others. In the wake of the Hochelaga by-election, where the NDP challenged the Bloc candidate for being anti-union and too conservative, I'm going to be following this trend, and taking a look at how the Québec labour movement is represented in the two parties' slates (and other parties' too of course if they show up there as well).
  
  Back to the choice of riding: it includes the west half of Thomas Mulcair's former provincial riding of Chomeday, and is currently represented by five-term Liberal M.P. Raymonde Folco. She found herself facing her former political aide, Agop Evereklian, as a Conservative candidate in the last campaign (he placed 3rd). Then last summer she appeared on Denis Coderre's list of M.P.'s he wanted to have retire to make way for new candidates. After a personal entreaty to new Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, Folco received his commitment of support for another run, and indeed it was in her riding where Ignatieff attended his first Québec fundraiser after Mr. Coderre's resignation (probably a welcome event, since the Liberal riding association there had run a deficit in both 2006 and 2007, and still has not filed its 2008 annual return some six months after the May 2009 deadline).
  
  Both the Bloc Québécois (which placed 2nd last time) and the Green Party (which placed 5th) have renominated their 2008 candidates, while I have no record of any Conservative candidate being installed as yet. Folco's vote-share has moved down from the 50-odd% she obtained in 1997 and 2000 (with campaign spending of 82% and 93% of the limit respectively) to 40-some% in the three elections since then (with declining spending of 60%, then 56% and recently as little as 52% of the limit), but the Bloc vote-share has been falling along with its spending as well. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that the other parties would try to find the kind of candidates they believe might be able to take advantage of any further weakening in Liberal organization there.
• Outremont, QC - On Tuesday, December 1, 2009, Coderre's nemesis Martin Cauchon was finally formalized by acclamation as the Liberal candidate in his former riding, his last remaining opponent Comlan Amouzou having withdrawn from the race weeks before. It's hard not to conclude that this riding will be the battle-royale to watch on the Island of Montréal in the next election, given the stakes for both Cauchon and the lone NDP Québec M.P. Thomas Mulcair who now holds the seat, as most commentators are assuming each man would be a contestant for his party's leadership whenever it next opens up. Seated next to Cauchon at his nomination meeting, meanwhile, was one of his likely competitors for that leadership: Papineau Liberal M.P. Justin Trudeau.

With those updates out of the way, we'll move on, as planned, to Eastern Ontario in the next nomination news roundup.

Meantime, as this blog approaches its second anniversary, it was kind of nice to be picked as one of the "Sites of the Week" on the Bloggerheads panel of CBC "Power and Politics" this evening, especially when the nod came from as experienced a blogger as @JeffJedras of BCer in TO (thanks, man).

Also, you can vote for Jeff's blog, or mine, or any of a number of excellent Canadian political blogs from right across the spectrum, during the first round of voting for the Canadian Blog Awards, which ends next Saturday, December 12 (that's a week from today, by the time you read this post). Pundits' Guide was also nominated in the "best blog post" category for the summer post "May-Day in Saanich-Gulf Islands" where I broke the news that Elizabeth May was being challenged for her nomination.

Labels: 41st General Election Nominations, Conservatives, Labour, Liberals, NDP