The real campaign starts now. Evan lays out the four scenarios that could each explain how this election ends (fragmentation, sleepwalking, consolidation, and the Lawson shock) and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: of the four candidates, the one with the lowest probability of winning is Jeff Leiper, because everybody else has already won something. I counter with my blow-up scenario, the one nobody’s talking about because it hasn’t happened yet: tens of thousands of public servants, students, and commuters all converging downtown after Labour Day on a transit system that isn’t ready. Plus two genuinely good policy releases from the challengers, a debate format nobody liked, and the metric that actually matters: 1,150 volunteers and $200,000 are inputs, not conversions.
Neil Saravanamutto’s fourth housing option is here. Alex Lawson’s jobs and growth plan is here.
The transcript of the episode is below:
Brigitte Pellerin (00:01): Hi everyone, hi Evan — how are you?
Evan Potter (00:04): Greetings. It’s the end of August. We’re on the way to Labour Day.
Brigitte Pellerin (00:07): And it’s the beginning of the real campaign. We have a lot to get to today, so let’s bust right into it.
You have a couple of distinct theories about what may happen. Now, we still don’t have the August Liaison poll — unless you’ve seen it. So we’re still running with numbers from several weeks ago. But things are moving, things are happening. And you sent me these four distinct scenarios. How about you run through them, and then I’ll tell you what my blow-up scenario might be.
Evan Potter (00:41): So it’s month number four of a long campaign, and there are a number of narratives, or theories of the election. But the first big theory you and I have to discuss is whether this is really a change election.
If you look at what we see at the ward level, it can’t be considered one — because twenty-one out of the twenty-two councillors seeking re-election will likely get re-elected. The only question mark is around Allan Hubley, and even he might get re-elected. And we have two open races: Kitchissippi, where Joanne Chianello will almost certainly be elected, and Stittsville.
Brigitte Pellerin (01:31): Where there are nine people or so. That one’s wide open.
Evan Potter (01:31): So based on the ward level, this is not a change election. We can only consider it one under a single real condition: if there’s a change in mayor.
We think Mark Sutcliffe is ahead. We don’t know if he’s ahead by six points, eight points, ten points — we won’t know until we see David Valentin’s public poll, and to my knowledge those numbers haven’t been released yet.
Brigitte Pellerin (02:04): No, I haven’t seen them either. I’m really curious.
Evan Potter (02:19): So: at the big-picture level, not a change election at the ward level; maybe a change election at the mayoral level.
Now let’s look at the four scenarios — the four theories of the case that I see having emerged over the last four months.
First: the fragmentation scenario. The entry of Neil Saravanamuttoo into the race fragmented the centre-left coalition that we assume Jeff Leiper was hoping to lead — combined with the fact that Leiper, based on everyone I’ve been talking to, is seen as underwhelming. And as I’ve said before, expectations were much higher for Jeff Leiper than for Alex Lawson or Neil Saravanamuttoo. That’s fair — it’s always relative to your opponents. But the feeling, even within the progressive community, is that Jeff has been underwhelming. They expected more. That’s scenario number one.
(03:32) Second: what I’d call sleepwalking to Mark Sutcliffe’s second term.
Brigitte Pellerin (03:40): Gross. That’s not a good thing.
Evan Potter (03:57): It’s related to fragmentation, but a little different. This is where the centre-left voices in Ottawa don’t row in the same direction — they’re not mobilizing, not coordinating. It’s the collective action problem. Classic. We saw it on Lansdowne 2.0. Jeff Leiper goes one way, Neil Saravanamuttoo goes another, and then other advocacy groups — maybe Horizon — go still another way. Nobody’s rowing in the same direction, and that leaves the lane open for Mark Sutcliffe to get his second term.
(04:36) Third: the consolidation scenario. This is where strategic voting comes in — and this goes to the open meeting I attended last night. The theory is that the Leiper ground campaign is so powerful that it has accumulated tens of thousands of votes that aren’t being picked up in the polling. They’re not showing up. But his ground game is so well organized, with infrastructure across all twenty-four wards, that at some point in late September people begin to realize the implications of scenario number one — the fragmentation thesis — and they consolidate around Jeff Leiper. They migrate away from Neil Saravanamuttoo to Jeff Leiper, and Leiper becomes mayor.
(05:43) And fourth: the shock scenario — the Lawson shock. Here the theory is that Alex Lawson’s surge, which was noted in July, is not a figment of anybody’s imagination. It’s not a mirage. It’s real, and it gains force throughout September, to the point where Valentin’s September poll has him in the high twenties, closing in on thirty, even before October. In this thesis, Alex Lawson supplants Jeff Leiper and becomes the mayor’s main opponent going into the last three weeks of the race — and perhaps beats the mayor at the end of it.
So those are the four theories I’ve seen emerging. And I think we should state quite honestly that Neil Saravanamuttoo and Alex Lawson have already won by losing. They’ve made their case. They’ve got their name recognition. They’ve won.
Brigitte Pellerin (06:59): They’ve made their case. People know who they are, and they’re set up for any other election.
Evan Potter (07:09): Even if Neil takes ten percent, he’s won. Alex takes twenty-five percent, he’s won. It’s huge. And the mayor wins if he runs a conventional front-runner campaign and gets thirty-five percent.
So, sadly for those supporting Jeff Leiper — the person with the least winning probability in this election is Jeff Leiper. It puts a lot of pressure on his campaign. And for those supporting him, they have to hope his infrastructure on the ground is as solid as his campaign manager Stephen Yardy says it is.
Brigitte Pellerin (08:04): And thank you — I like this more academic way of looking at things, analyzing it, putting it in little boxes.
Evan Potter (08:10): And Brigitte, the dominant narrative is of course scenarios one and two.
Brigitte Pellerin (08:22): Well, I was about to say: it looks to me like the Sutcliffe campaign is reading things the way you are. Because the mayor is running what I think is the world’s most boring political campaign. Not doing much of anything. It’s not exciting. There are no balloons, there’s nothing. There’s really nothing going on.
Evan Potter (08:35): Because he doesn’t need to. If his internal polling is showing him eight to ten points ahead of his nearest competitor, he just continues to do what he does. He doesn’t have to show up at any community mayoral events. Doesn’t have to do anything.
Brigitte Pellerin (08:57): That’s right.
Let me talk about my blow-up scenario. My blow-up scenario — and it’s the subject of my next Ottawa Citizen column — is the return to office, and the mess a lot of people are expecting.
I don’t know who you hang out with in this city when you go out for drinks with friends, but in my circles there are a lot of people in the federal public service. And whenever you mention return to office, people go —
(09:27) All right, let’s thrash this out. And I’m going to say up front that this is a problem that disproportionately affects women. Because — I know it’s a gendered thing to say, but it’s still the reality for a lot of families — the mom is still taking care of more of the administrative things at home. Guys aren’t quite caught up yet, though they’re trying. Anyway, it does affect women more than men. And they’re not the ones out there talking to pollsters as much. But they vote.
Here’s the problem I see: we have tens of thousands of people about to start trying to get to the office downtown, along with students. The French school board has started already, the English school board starts next week, and then uOttawa starts right after Labour Day. And then tens of thousands of public servants.
And as you know, if you’ve been awake at any point in the last five years, the transit system is not ready for this influx of people. Neither are the roads. Neither are the parking spots downtown. It is going to be a colossal mess, with people really, really upset at wasting so many hours of every single day.
And this is where the three challengers all agree. First of all, the city’s own return-to-office mandate — everyone, five days a week — only affects about two thousand people, more or less, because most city jobs are already in-person.
Evan Potter (11:02): Yeah, fifteen percent.
Brigitte Pellerin (11:24): It’s the federal public service that matters. Now, it’s not up to the city to decide that. But the city — or anybody running for mayor right now — should be making a big show of imploring, like Jeff Leiper did earlier this week and the other two chimed in on. Get on your knees. I don’t know. Do something. Try to lead, and get the federal government to say: this is not going to work. Please, at the very least, pause this. Give us three months, six months, something. Just don’t do it right now.
And Mark Sutcliffe is the only one who is not only not resisting this — he’s been championing the issue, saying that return to office would be good both for downtown and for the transit system. Which is probably the stupidest thing Mark Sutcliffe has ever said. Also the most wrong. Maybe it will benefit downtown — but at the expense of restaurant owners in Barrhaven and coffee shops in Stittsville and what have you.
This is going to be the big one. We don’t talk about it right now because it hasn’t happened yet. But it’s coming.
Evan Potter (12:08): So you call it the sleeper issue, and it may yet be the sleeper issue. I see an enormous amount of pressure on general manager Rick Leary, the head of our transit service, because all eyes will be on him — as part of the city’s senior leadership — to help ensure it doesn’t become one. That the system is flexible enough to absorb the increased traffic. That there will not be lots of unfortunate headlines for the mayor.
Rick Leary, effectively just by his position — and it could be any GM of our transit system — is a political heat shield for the mayor. This is Leary’s fourth major transit job. I’m thinking that, coming from Toronto, he can handle it, that he has a plan in place, and that it does not turn into a sleeper issue in the election campaign.
Brigitte Pellerin (13:38): I’m going to put you right on the spot. What are the odds that the system — transit, traffic, and parking — is working well enough to avoid this becoming a massive issue between now and election day?
Evan Potter (13:57): Okay. There’s one element of that trifecta that Rick Leary cannot control, and that’s downtown parking. He can control the number of buses, the special lanes, how many trains. He cannot control the finite number of parking spaces.
Brigitte Pellerin (14:24): There’s only so much space.
Evan Potter (14:25): There’s only so much space. And as you and I and many of our viewers know, every time I get on the Queensway, at some point there’s congestion.
Brigitte Pellerin (14:38): That’s the best parking lot in the city, incidentally.
Evan Potter (14:44): There were years when I could sail down the Queensway. And I haven’t seen that in about five years.
Brigitte Pellerin (14:48): Maybe not at eight a.m., but by ten you were fine, right? I’m old enough to remember that too. I remember trying to get to CFRA radio in the Market for eight a.m. on a weekday, from Westboro — ten, twelve minutes. Try that today.
Evan Potter (15:02): It was amazing. Though I have to say, driving to Orléans from downtown, I’m still impressed that on some occasions I can get to my destination in fourteen minutes on the Queensway. Going east has been a lot quicker than going west.
But I take your point. Will this be a sleeper issue? If I’m in Mark Sutcliffe’s campaign office, of course I’m preparing for all of this — trying to get assurances, being reassured by the senior leadership that they have all contingencies planned.
Brigitte Pellerin (15:57): All you need to screw this up is one photo on the news, or one video, of people having to get off a train between stations and trudge along the tracks. We’ve seen videos like this — people lining up, that human sea of people at Tunney’s. You just need one of those. We’ve had it with transit in this town. We’re done.
Evan Potter (16:22): We know that transit is Mark Sutcliffe’s Achilles heel, and he knows it. And everybody around him in Sutcliffe world knows it. So we’ll know in about ten days.
Brigitte Pellerin (16:35): I think they’re trying to deny it, though. That’s my sense — but I could be wrong about that.
Fun times. All right — let’s move on, because in addition to the big RTO announcement this week, there were two other announcements from the challengers.
Let’s start with Neil Saravanamuttoo’s announcement of a fourth option for people finding housing — beyond buying a house, renting from a commercial landlord, and being in social housing. His fourth option would be renting from public, not-for-profit owners: high-quality apartments with mixed-income units, on a cost-recovery basis. Which I assume means charging enough rent to break even but not make a profit. I’m not an economist, but that’s probably what it means.
Evan Potter (17:27): Break even. Yes.
Brigitte Pellerin (17:38): I like that idea. I think I’m going to be one of twenty-two people in the city who likes it, though. What do you think? You think it’s a great idea? Okay — prove me wrong. Go.
Evan Potter (17:43): It’s a great idea. Of course. Let’s be frank about this: the proposals being put forward by the challenger candidates are mostly eminently reasonable. It’s hard for people to say, Alex Lawson, that’s a really dumb idea. Using apprenticeships to increase job opportunities in the city. Or, Neil, public-option housing — that’s a radical idea. No, it’s not radical. It’s eminently doable.
And I think the only question, for a lot of people, is: what’s taken the City of Ottawa so long? Neil is putting forward reasonable, not radical, policy proposals that the city should have — could have — been working on for years. When I read the proposal, I find myself nodding my head. It’s reasonable. We should have more of it.
Brigitte Pellerin (18:56): I didn’t see much of a reaction anywhere — on social networks it didn’t seem to grab people. Maybe they’re still on vacation and haven’t noticed.
Evan Potter (19:00): In most West European cities, this is just normal. This is what a normal, large metropolitan city does to support affordable housing. It’s not radical.
Brigitte Pellerin (19:19): All right. So that’s a good one.
Alex Lawson released on Thursday, I believe, a comprehensive — I’m going to put it that way — seventeen-page jobs and growth platform. I read through it. And I should say that this past week I had conversations with both Jeff Leiper and Alex Lawson, including a long conversation with Alex Lawson, so I knew this was coming. He didn’t tell me everything that was in it, but I knew it was coming.
Reading it earlier this week, I was struck — and I’m not an economist and I’m not a growth expert — by how he’d managed to identify gaps in what we’re doing as a city on job creation, on the growth of the job market, and on bringing in new employers.
The part I liked most is how to use the skills of the people we already have in this city. We have a lot of highly educated people, often bilingual — a large proportion of bilingual people — people who either have a security clearance or could get one. So why not try to attract employers who would benefit from that? He mentioned using Quebec City as an example, and that’s true: Quebec City does that, and they have this massive insurance marketplace. So: target employers who would benefit from the qualifications people here have, make it easier for them to come here, and then match them with people looking for work.
And again, like you were saying a minute ago — why aren’t we doing that? That was my reaction reading Alex Lawson’s plan. So what did you think of it?
Evan Potter (21:03): Why aren’t we doing that? It’s a great idea. And again — not radical. Some of it is just common sense.
I recall trying to find line cooks for a restaurant. I called Algonquin College, the culinary school there, and I tried for a couple of years. I just couldn’t get any apprentice cooks for the restaurant. And I thought, this is bizarre. It always bothered me that there wasn’t a place in Ottawa where there would be a funnel — like Alex talks about — a channelling of talent. The apprenticeship programs.
Now, I know that overlaps into provincial educational jurisdiction. I understand that. But I also understand the point Alex Lawson is making: surely the City of Ottawa, this five-billion-dollar corporation, has some tools at its disposal to — I’ll use the word — facilitate the development of those connections between talented young people, or people of all ages seeking employment, and employers.
So once again, none of this is radical. A lot of it is common sense, and I hope people at the door pay attention.
Brigitte Pellerin (22:48): He also talks a lot in this plan about young people and unemployment — and this touches my own household. It’s very difficult for teenagers these days to find entry-level jobs. The McDonald’s jobs. They don’t even hire seventeen-year-olds anymore, because there’s this pool of older folks, adults, who are out of work, available full-time, and will take that job — because they’re really desperate, either for a first job or a second one, because of the affordability crisis.
So you have your seventeen-year-old with little or no experience trying to get an entry-level job, competing against someone who has experience and will get hired like that over the teenager.
Evan Potter (23:49): Experience. They need experience.
Brigitte Pellerin (23:40): And I’m sure I’m not the only parent in this situation in this town, or in this province. But the pathway to getting a job right now is almost a brick wall in their face. First of all, it makes it hard for them to get ahead. You remember being seventeen and being broke all the time — and you don’t want to be broke and dependent on your parents. You can tell your kid to go find a job. And I can tell you it’s not because they’re not trying. It’s just very hard to find jobs. He talks about that a lot, and I appreciate it, because it’s a real problem.
(24:07) I’m not expert enough to know whether the solution he’s proposing would help, so I welcome the opinion of people who know more about this. But naming the issue, naming the problem — you can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s there. So it was necessary to do that, and I’m grateful for it as a mom.
Evan Potter (24:31): We both think Lawson and Saravanamuttoo are coming up with some good ideas.
Brigitte Pellerin (24:37): The ideas are very good. And I think the RTO pause that Jeff Leiper proposed is also good — other people had already talked about this, so they’re kind of stealing each other’s ideas, which is great. If an idea is good, steal it.
Another good one, which I think they all agree on except Sutcliffe, is encouraging the federal government to have more satellite offices — in Barrhaven, Gloucester, wherever — so people can go work at an office without spending three hours a day getting to and from the office.
Evan Potter (25:07): Yeah. Good idea.
Brigitte Pellerin (25:05): We only have a few more minutes. Did you want to talk about the open Leiper campaign meeting, and the mayoral debate at the Sportsplex you went to?
Evan Potter (25:15): Let’s get the mayoral debate at the Sportsplex over with. I went. It was a full house. It was what you would expect — the progressive community came out. Seven candidates, but only two of the front-runners: Neil Saravanamuttoo and Jeff Leiper.
I don’t like that format. I saw it last year in the Osgoode by-election, where candidates literally had prepared answers, which some of them read off a page. That’s not a debate. To be fair, they didn’t do that this week. But “give me your vision of Ottawa in thirty seconds, or a minute and a half” — and as a number of commentators have already said, putting the front-runners on the same stage as quote-unquote fringe candidates... I don’t like to use the word fringe. But they have no hope in hell of becoming mayor.
Brigitte Pellerin (26:11): There are two tiers here.
Evan Potter (26:21): They’re two different tiers. So on the one hand, we don’t want to discourage people from running for public office. But on the other hand, what’s required is a real debate among the four front-runners: the mayor, Saravanamuttoo, Lawson, and Leiper. That’s what the city wants to hear.
Brigitte Pellerin (26:28): I love fringe candidates. They’re great. But you’re right. All right — let’s put the call out there. Somebody do it.
Evan Potter (26:50): Hopefully CBC local or CTV will do that.
Now, on last night’s open campaign discussion with Jeff Leiper and his team — this is the second or third open campaign meeting. Here’s my impression.
Brigitte Pellerin (27:07): At least the second. I may have missed one.
Evan Potter (27:15): Stephen Yardy, his campaign manager, made a presentation on the process — again showing us, on the basis of campaign metrics, how many signs, how many volunteers, how many donations. The campaign is doing very well.
When I teach my courses on public relations at the University of Ottawa, these would be called the campaign inputs: all the promotion you’re doing, the volunteers you’re getting to move your persuasive campaign forward. But I always remind students: the only metric that counts is your conversions. People who are buying what you’re selling. And in a political context, there’s a one-day sale, and that sale is on October twenty-sixth. You’re either going to win or you’re going to lose.
So it’s great that the Leiper campaign had eleven hundred and fifty volunteers in August. It’s great that it’s almost hitting two hundred thousand dollars in donations. But, Brigitte —
Brigitte Pellerin (28:29): That’s not what wins elections yet.
Evan Potter (28:35): If your polling shows that you’re locked — and I’m not saying he’s going to be locked into twenty-five percent until election day — but if the probability-based polling is accurate, or relatively accurate within a margin of error, and it’s showing Jeff Leiper locked in at twenty-five percent, that means that seemingly high level of support is coming from the twenty-five percent, the progressive community in Ottawa, that was already persuaded he was their only choice.
Brigitte Pellerin (29:10): Right. So it’s not conversion. It’s confirmation.
Evan Potter (29:13): What conversion means is going from having all those volunteers pulling your campaign from twenty-five percent to thirty-one, thirty-two percent. If you can show that correlation, then yes — those metrics are very impressive. So the jury’s still out, because we need to see the polling.
Can I also say one other thing?
Brigitte Pellerin (29:41): We’re almost out of time, but — okay.
Evan Potter (29:43): This is important for you and for everyone. Jeff did not say one word in French last night. Nothing. He had a chance to read something out in French, and there was a question about what he would do for the francophone community — he did not address it.
(30:09) And this illustrates to me why some people have reservations about Jeff Leiper as a candidate. These are the kind of — I don’t know, mistakes, oversights. It’s hard for me to imagine that somebody who is going to take this city forward will not even say a few words in French at his own open campaign meeting.
Brigitte Pellerin (30:14): All right. Well, that’s good to know.
(30:29) Yeah — that’s an unforced error.
All right then. Lots to chew on, and we have lots more to look at this coming week. So we’ll look forward to seeing you next week. And thanks again for this — I think people will have had their heads set buzzing, because there was a lot of substance in this one. Thanks very much for that. Talk to you later. Bye.
Evan Potter (30:45): Great. We’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.
