Politics

[curgoth]

I just spent a little time looking into the local candidates for the big three parties. In a pleasant surprise, after being disappointed with our Provincial canididate last year, I was fairly impressed with Paul Summerville, and his website. Sadly, he doesn't stand much chance of getting more than a handful of votes because he is running against Carolyn Bennett, and Peter Kent.

Summerville is arguably one of the more "right-wing" or at least "mainstream" NDP candidates out there - he's arguably the NDP's entire economic platform - he's a former Bay street economist, who has worked his entire career inside the machine that more radical NDP supporters would love to see dismantled. He's caught a lot of flak because of this, but it's the only reason I think he has a chance of making a semi-decent showing.

Bennett is Minister of State (public health), and has held this riding for quite a while. She's got a pretty good record on women's rights and generally seems not bad, for a Liberal. It unlikely that either of the other candidates will manage to oust her. She won the last election by over 20,000 votes.

Kent is a news anchor for Global TV, and as such, has a lot more name and face recognition than the other candidates. (For Americans - he's the older brother of "SCUD stud" Arthur Kent).
In researching this, I discovered that the average household income for my riding is twice the average household income for the country. I knew my neighbours were rich, but I didn't realise that many of them were *that* rich. Zil and I are well below average for this neighbourhood, though still "doing pretty damned well" compared to the national average.

*edit* I started this *before* I went on vacation, and just found that I had left the window open... Yes, I am silly.

Kent seems to be winning the sign competition so far - I haven't seen a single orange sign, though that's not a surprise for this neighbourhood.