For debates on Rogers TV, start here. The Ottawa Student Debate is here. Evan’s piece on the councillors supporting Mark Sutcliffe is here.
Transcript
Brigitte Pellerin (00:01): Hi everyone, hi Evan — how are you doing today?
Evan Potter (00:04): Very well. I feel a bit of coolness, a briskness in the air.
Brigitte Pellerin (00:08): Yes — enjoy the last bits of summer, when it comes, between noon and two every day. But this is a great time of year, and it’s a sign the election is coming. So is the flurry of activity. We have a lot to talk about this week, because stuff is happening.
But before we get into that, I want to put in a good plug for our friends at Rogers TV, who have produced — I don’t know how they got this done — candidate debates, not just for the mayor’s race but for all the wards. And when you look at the videos, you see interesting view numbers. I think people are more interested than you and I have been giving them credit for. We’ve been calling this a bit of a dead campaign, and I want to hope and believe there’s more interest than we can see.
I’ll put a link to where you can find those debates. Go find your ward — and feel free to listen to all the ward races if you want. There are really good, interesting debates there to watch.
Evan Potter (01:15): I totally agree. Kudos to Rogers. I’ve been watching the debates on YouTube, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised that there’s actually been a debate.
Remember, we said that in some of our experiences people were just reading out their answers — they’d received the questions in advance, and they were sitting at a table reading the answers out. I think in one debate that actually happened. It wasn’t really a debate, and that was disappointing. But then I watched other local debates where that wasn’t the case, and there was an actual debate among the candidates — which is what people are looking for.
Brigitte Pellerin (01:58): Exactly. And then there was the Ottawa students’ mayoral debate earlier this week, which — I have to give them massive kudos. I couldn’t be there in person, but I watched the recording, and I’ll add the link to the show notes. It’s long. But the format was wonderful. The questions were really smart and knowledgeable, and the answers were interesting.
Unfortunately, only three candidates were present. The mayor didn’t show up, and didn’t offer an explanation as to why he wasn’t there. The other three tended to agree a lot on what they’d do differently, so we didn’t get big clashes — but there were some really good moments. They laughed. It was a smart debate. I’m like: yay! It’s really worth watching.
Evan Potter (02:47): I read the media report on it, and I understand it was a packed hall — people had to be turned away. That’s good.
We’ve talked a little about the quote-unquote youth vote, the younger vote, first-time voters, throughout these podcasts. And I’ve asked a few people along the way whether there was any major effort underway to encourage younger people to vote. It looks like there is no formal effort by an interest group to do this. So it really is up to the individual campaigns, when they’re door-knocking, to ask — literally, as we’ve said before on the podcast — whether there’s a younger member in the household and whether they intend to vote.
Brigitte Pellerin (03:41): I know. I have two newish voters. One has voted before, but not at the city level — this would be her third election — and one for whom this is the first. So I’ve been leaning on them: I don’t care who you vote for, but please vote.
Evan Potter (03:52): And one of the stats that came out in the local coverage — the journalist was interviewing the student organizer — is that there are something like 160,000 young people in the Ottawa area. So if one of the mayoral candidates has mobilized part of that vote, it could be significant.
Brigitte Pellerin (04:21): And this is one reason I was really surprised not to see Mark Sutcliffe at that debate. As I understand it, he didn’t offer an explanation. He’s not talking to me much these days, so I don’t know what was on his mind. But the optics were awful.
Evan Potter (04:30): The standard explanation from the comms people — take it for what you will — is that there were scheduling conflicts.
Brigitte Pellerin (04:44): Right. As I understand it, this came as last-minute news to the organizing committee. Now, if I’m wrong, somebody can point me to the right answer — but as I understand it, the organizers expected him up until that day. That’s what I’ve been led to believe.
And that’s not a great thing, especially when you’re looking at polls showing you have competition. It’s a four-way race. If you can’t attend, that’s one thing — but then you let people know as early as you can, and you make some kind of statement saying: I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, it’s not a show of disrespect, there’s legitimately a lot happening and I can’t make this one.
Evan Potter (05:27): There is a way of doing this. You can submit a statement to the organizers that they read out at the event. There are all sorts of communications ways to protect yourself. But just not showing up will be interpreted as a lack of respect. It will be interpreted as the front-runner assuming he doesn’t need the youth vote, and doesn’t care.
Brigitte Pellerin (06:12): What do you gain by being disrespectful?
Evan Potter (06:02): So you don’t want that to be the narrative. Even if, in fact, the youth vote does not matter to you, you don’t want that to be the narrative. And the fact that the mayor lets that be the narrative also tells us something about the mayor.
Brigitte Pellerin (06:18): It’s a message. And it’s very loud.
(06:18) By contrast, earlier this week — on a different day — there was another debate organized by another group, mostly on environmental issues. The mayor was there, and so were Neil Saravanamuttoo and Jeff Leiper. But not Alex Lawson.
And on Twitter, one of the mayor’s communications people — I’m not going to out him; people can go look for it themselves — poked at Alex Lawson and said, well, big tough guy on Twitter was too scared to show up. I’m paraphrasing.
Evan Potter (06:52): No, we can name names, Brigitte. It’s DG Stringer. We all saw that tweet. He’s the co-chair. He’s a public person — he’s made himself a public person — so we can call him by name.
Brigitte Pellerin (06:55): It’s public. It’s on Twitter. He knows what he’s doing.
(07:00) So I reached out to Alex Lawson and gave him the opportunity: do you want to explain why you weren’t there? What he said to me was: look, there are a lot of events and I can’t make all of them. He did not explain why this one in particular got cut. But he did add that he had told the organizers well ahead of time that he wasn’t going to make it — so this was not a surprise.
People can believe what they want and interpret it any way they like. But for the mayor’s team to not give much of an explanation beyond scheduling issues, and then poke the other guy as the big tough guy who’s not here — which was a childish tweet anyway.
Evan Potter (07:42): We’ve seen this before from the mayor’s team, from the mayor’s comms. And what it says is: we don’t care. That’s the message it sends — that you don’t matter enough to us for us to actually give an explanation. Again, it speaks volumes.
Brigitte Pellerin (08:09): And the mayor was also busy this week. On Wednesday he had his official launch party. We were both there in person.
I was talking to the people organizing it, and they said they had maybe about four hundred people registered. I think we can agree it was somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred in the room — including just about half the Liberal Party of the Ottawa area. We could talk about that in a second.
And you were there with your notebook. How many city councillors?
Evan Potter (08:45): I did a column on that yesterday. A whopping — almost half of city council showed up. Ten councillors. And the ones who showed up, almost all of them would be considered by you and me and others as allies of the mayor on council.
Let’s not mince words: this may not be the poisonous council of late 2022 under Jim Watson, but this is a split council. So the ten we saw there — these are the allies. They weren’t there for the piece of pizza and a glass of water.
Brigitte Pellerin (09:21): I’ll link to your column so people can go see who was there. If it’s one of your councillors, that gives you an indication.
Evan Potter (09:34): That, or the shawarma. That’s not what they were there for. They were there to stand for Mark. Let’s be clear. And as I said in my column, this is fine.
Brigitte Pellerin (09:41): And that’s fine. I like that, actually — show your colours. Let people make their decision based on your behaviour and what you’re doing.
(09:59) I did comment on the ambience. I was there four years ago — were you? Same room, same place, at St. Elias. Four years ago there were a lot more people in that room, and the energy was a lot stronger. This time people were happy and they clapped, but it was like a six or seven intensity. Four years ago it was tilting. It was good.
Evan Potter (10:20): I like the number you gave it. It was a kind of seven.
Brigitte Pellerin (10:26): Yeah. Good-ish.
Evan Potter (10:28): Brigitte, it was a made-for-local-TV, made-for-print-journalism event. That’s the entire purpose. He’s been campaigning since June, and he had his official staff campaign launch a few weeks ago. So this was just a made-for-TV moment to get a headline.
Brigitte Pellerin (10:52): I know you don’t want to talk about Jeff Leiper too much, because you’ve said so many things so many times. So I’m going to talk about Jeff Leiper a little, if you don’t. I have a TED talk ready on this one.
The fact that he has not — and there’s still time — but I am not aware of anybody on council who is overtly supporting him. Did I miss some kind of endorsement?
Evan Potter (11:17): We both missed it, if so.
Brigitte Pellerin (11:21): Other than maybe Catherine McKenney?
Evan Potter (11:24): He has two endorsements. The MPP for Ottawa West–Nepean, and Catherine McKenney.
Brigitte Pellerin (11:34): Anita Vanderbilt? No — not Anita. Sorry, I’m getting my MPPs and my MPs mixed up.
Evan Potter (11:36): Chandra. Chandra Pasma.
Brigitte Pellerin (11:42): That’s right. Thank you. Chandra is endorsing Jeff, that’s right. And Catherine McKenney. I’m not aware of any other politician.
Evan Potter (11:49): But have you heard Chandra or Catherine say anything since?
Brigitte Pellerin (12:03): No. And again — if I missed it, I know the folks on Jeff’s campaign, so please send me links, because I would love to be able to publicize that.
Now, I know people — including some good friends — who are working for Jeff Leiper. And these are not political novices. These are experienced people. And they insist they have good reasons to be confident.
I love my friends and I respect their work. And I think they’re out to lunch. If I’m wrong, I will eat my crow, and that’s not a problem.
But here’s my problem with Jeff Leiper. You called it several weeks ago — you said he hit the ground walking and never really picked up speed. He is campaigning like a guy who doesn’t want the job.
Evan Potter (12:47): That’s a strong version.
Brigitte Pellerin (12:50): It’s strong.
We saw the mayor, earlier this week or last week, make a claim about having found — I forget the exact numbers — so many millions of dollars in efficiencies in the budget over the last four years of council. And Neil Saravanamuttoo came out a couple of days ago with what I thought was a brilliant video message. Short. To the point.
Evan Potter (13:10): Brilliant video. Yep.
Brigitte Pellerin (13:12): Saying: I call BS on this. These are not savings, these are ravings. And he went through it with graphics, showing the budgets. Now, he’s an economist, so he speaks that language — but he made it clear to me, and I’m not a numbers person.
I don’t know the numbers well enough to know whether Neil is right or Mark is right. One of them is right; one of them is wrong. But regardless, the video was a smackdown — done with numbers and facts. Not nasty. Adversarial, a little aggressive, but not nasty at all, not personal. The tone was: no, Mark, you’re wrong, and here’s why.
And why isn’t Jeff coming out with videos like that?
Evan Potter (13:57): I don’t know, and neither does anyone else in town. That’s the answer. He’s got an entire comms team, experienced people, and they’re rolling out these boring videos of Jeff reading policy notes. I have to say, it is profoundly disappointing.
Brigitte Pellerin (14:19): For all the people who are disappointed with Mark Sutcliffe right now — for the last year and a bit, Jeff Leiper was a great big hope. And now he’s campaigning like a guy who doesn’t care.
And I know Jeff. I know he wants to do a great job. And I know he’s trying not to campaign in an aggressive or nasty way. I get that. But it’s just not working. I don’t see the numbers that show it’s working.
Evan Potter (14:50): So I will now come in to defend Jeff. Role reversal.
Brigitte Pellerin (14:54): Role reversal. You go.
Evan Potter (14:50): It’s not that he doesn’t care. Of course he cares. It’s that he hasn’t performed. As I’ve said before, he had to overperform noticeably against Mark Sutcliffe — as the de facto leader of the opposition, which is a position he never wanted.
Because surely, after a year — his campaign has been working on this for a year, as Stephen Yardy always tells people at the open campaign meetings, we’ve been doing this for a year — well, if you’ve been doing this for a year, your candidate has to be able to overperform in the last two months of a campaign. Noticeably. And he hasn’t noticeably overperformed. That’s been his biggest problem.
(15:41) Now, the only salvation is his ground game. So Yardy had better have an extraordinary ground game going on right now that nobody in Ottawa sees the totality of, and that isn’t being picked up — I’ll repeat myself — in the polling. And then we’ll be shocked when Jeff Leiper becomes mayor, because we didn’t see it coming, because we couldn’t see him perform.
He had to overperform from his baseline, and he wasn’t. And the campaign on comms isn’t overperforming either. Meanwhile you have competitors, Neil and Alex, who are overperforming from their baselines. They’re exceeding expectations. Jeff has not exceeded expectations, and he needed to.
And therein lies the problem for the Jeff campaign — from the outside looking in, not the inside. That’s why there’s disappointment around town.
(17:11) And that’s why, when I’ve asked people on council — I took the opportunity at the St. Elias launch event to ask some of the councillors, and then other councillors who weren’t there, people you’d think would be allies of Jeff Leiper — they did not have clear explanations as to why he doesn’t have endorsements from people with some public profile in Ottawa. And it’s five weeks before election day.
Brigitte Pellerin (17:32): It’s getting there. I mean — maybe that’s his big surprise at the end of the month. It’s on September twenty-eighth. I’ve registered for that, so I’m going to show up, and I want to know what the big surprise is. That could be it. And if so, that’s four weeks or so before voting day. That’s good timing.
Evan Potter (17:54): Here’s my riff on surprises. If you’re going to announce a big surprise in advance — and I have no idea what it is, I’ve not asked. Is it my call-out for the big, beautiful idea? Maybe.
But if you tell us you’re going to have a big surprise, when that surprise arrives, it had better be good.
Brigitte Pellerin (18:25): Knock my socks off.
Evan Potter (18:30): It has to knock your socks off. Everybody in Ottawa has to be talking about it. And if it’s just one big deflating moment where you’re going — that’s all you’ve got, Jeff?
I’m not going to say that’s the end of his campaign, because we don’t know what’s happening on the ground. That’s his salvation. That’s his one salvation: what’s happening on the ground, Jeff.
But I think it will turn off a lot of people. And if it’s a deflating moment — if the surprise isn’t big enough — the people you think would come out for Jeff, including members of council, they will not come out.
Brigitte Pellerin (19:14): Why would you? You’re not going to attach your name to someone you perceive to be a loser.
Evan Potter (19:19): They’re not going to attach their name to it. And then they’ll reconcile themselves — to themselves, and maybe to a few close colleagues on council — to another four years of Mark Sutcliffe as mayor.
Brigitte Pellerin (19:31): There’s one more salvation for Jeff Leiper, and it’s Alex Lawson.
Evan Potter (19:37): Yes, of course. I always say there are two: the ground game and Alex Lawson.
Brigitte Pellerin (19:42): There are two. And if both happen at the same time, then he’s good. But you’re relying on things you can’t control — except the ground game. Relying on Alex Lawson eating into Mark Sutcliffe’s support is not something you control. Great if it happens. If I’m Jeff Leiper’s campaign, I want it to happen. But I can’t control it. So I want to focus on the things I can control and go all out on those.
Evan Potter (20:02): The only thing the Jeff Leiper campaign controls — with an underperforming candidate, which he is relative to who he is, a three-term councillor — is the ground game.
So they have to hit a hundred thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand doors. He has to get the hundred and ten thousand votes in the bag that Catherine got in 2022. And then he has to add maybe ten thousand — young people, the forty thousand irregular voters I keep talking about. He’s got to be at a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty thousand.
Then he has to hope that Alex Lawson knocks thirty or forty thousand off Mark Sutcliffe’s 2022 vote — he got a hundred and sixty thousand. And then Jeff has a very narrow path. And that would be, by all accounts, an incredible upset.
But everything I’ve seen over the past year of observing this campaign doesn’t give me great confidence for Jeff Leiper. Again — there are only about two people who know what’s really going on in the Leiper campaign, and that’s Jeff Leiper and Stephen Yardy.
Brigitte Pellerin (21:23): So this weekend I’m going to an event with Alex Lawson, somewhere near Manotick. I’m curious, because I have not seen his crowd. I want to see what the atmosphere is like, the kinds of questions people ask — and the kinds of things I’m going to go and ask. Like: why are you here, and what do you see in this? I’m really, really curious.
Evan Potter (22:00): You need to be very curious. Because I’ve been asking a lot of questions, as have you, about the polling — about Liaison’s August poll.
And I was reminded today that the poll was done. It went into the field, because there are results on homelessness. So if you look at the Liaison poll, it clearly went into the field, including on the mayor’s race. Somebody has decided not to release it.
And why? It’s created a lot of speculation, as we all know, about whether the Alex Lawson surge was ever real.
(22:49) So the public now needs to know, and the media needs to know, and the other campaigns need to know: is he at twenty-five or twenty-six percent, or is that a mirage?
As I noted in my column yesterday on the Mark Sutcliffe event with the ten councillors — I talked to one councillor, a Sutcliffe ally, and he was of the view that Alex was not making any inroads. He hadn’t seen him in his ward.
Brigitte Pellerin (23:15): I don’t believe in fifty percent for Mark Sutcliffe.
Evan Potter (23:19): In his ward — and you had seen signs for Alex there. But he said, and I put this in my column: you know what, I think the mayor can get to fifty or sixty percent, because I don’t believe in the Alex Lawson surge.
I don’t believe that myself. But he wasn’t kidding. He just did not believe it. So I put the word vaporous in his mouth, and he was happy with it. He said: yes, you can put that word in my mouth — Alex Lawson’s support is a mirage.
And you now need to see, Brigitte, whether Alex has support in those critical rural and outer suburban wards. Because if that is indeed a mirage, then Sutcliffe gets his second term.
Brigitte Pellerin (24:07): So I want to end on a local race.
I’ve been driving around. I went to Stittsville and Kanata South to see what the signs were like. And there are more signs in the wards that are competitive than in those that aren’t. Fair enough.
I’m also going this weekend to Matt Luloff’s ward — Orléans, Ward 1 — where I’m going to be shadowing Bob Bell. He’s a candidate there I didn’t really know much about until a friend told me about him, and about the videos he’s been making commuting from Orléans downtown — from Algonquin back to Orléans — documenting how long it takes. He’s also very present online.
And his team tells me he has knocked on almost ten thousand doors since May, which suggests to me that he’s not sleeping and he’s only knocking on doors. Really full-time.
So I’m going to shadow him this weekend. I want to get a feel for it. I don’t know Orléans as much as I should — I know that’s on me — so I’m going to go and listen very carefully.
Evan Potter (25:13): Well, that’s good. Because Bob Bell has become Matt Luloff’s best friend.
Again, a situation where you get the splitting of the opposing candidates’ votes. He’s going to split the vote with Barbara Gandolfo, who started much earlier — she was already unofficially campaigning last year. She wasn’t waiting till May.
So if Bob is in a full-court press, that is probably good news for Matt Luloff. And then we’re getting again into these split votes that almost always favour the incumbent.
Brigitte Pellerin (26:02): But people know that, right? You have to give credit to voters. They understand the dynamics. They understand the math. They understand strategic voting.
And sometimes they say: well, I don’t care about strategic voting, this is the person I want to vote for. And sometimes people say: there’s a person I really don’t want to win again, so I’m going to arrange accordingly. Both are valid. It’s your vote — you do what you want with it.
So it’s going to be very interesting to see what’s going on in that ward.
(26:39) Anything else you’re watching? We have about a minute left. Or are you just going to take a break, because it’s been a lot?
Evan Potter (26:39): There was a Stittsville debate — the Stittsville Village Association had one last night. I haven’t looked at it yet; it’s online. I’ll have a look. Chelsea — is it Walden? — seems to be one of the leading candidates.
And then we might look at Clarke Kelly, Ward 5. I am told to look at Ward 5, so I will. West Carleton-March, a rural ward. Something is apparently happening there. I don’t know exactly what, but I’m told we should have a look.
Brigitte Pellerin (27:30): It’s also fair season in the area — there are a bunch of fairs happening. So if you’re going to a fair, especially in the more rural wards, you can probably expect to see your candidates there. Along with the corn and the rides and all the fun at fairs — ask them questions. They’re there for you. They’re there to serve. That’s their job.
Take advantage of it and ask them pointed questions.
(27:58) I think there’s more interest and action now in this campaign than there was three weeks ago, and that’s a good thing to see. Maybe people were smarter than we were and they vacationed during the summer, and now they’re paying attention. I don’t know. But it’s good to see.
Evan Potter (28:15): Every four years this allows a citywide discussion about local issues. That is all good. It’s great.
Will it change the actual composition of council on October twenty-seventh? We’ll see in the mayor’s race. We’ll see in Kanata South. But it’s going to be the same council.
Brigitte Pellerin (28:39): Well, on that note — we’ll talk next week. Have a great weekend. Bye.
Evan Potter (28:41): Okay. You too. Bye-bye.6
