Liberals think they have a shot at Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo riding
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 10:00:19 +0000
Among British Columbia’s interior ridings, Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo is sought-after territory in the 2019 federal election.
Solidly Conservative since the early 2000s, the 2015 election surprisingly turned into a closer race with incumbent Cathy McLeod winning with a much smaller margin than her previous outings in 2011 and 2008.
And with Liberal candidate Steve Powrie finishing third with the party’s strongest result since 2006, in almost a dead heat with second-place finisher Bill Sundhu of the NDP, the party has its sights on potentially turning it into a swing riding.
The Liberals recruited Terry Lake, a long-time provincial MLA for Kamloops and popular former mayor, as a star candidate for the riding this time around.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has visited the riding twice during the campaign, which shows that the party sees him “as somebody who can take the seat from the conservatives,” said Robert Hanlon, an associate prof in political science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.
“I think it really is about Cathy McLeod’s base and those (who) may want to vote Terry Lake in,” Hanlon said, though it is difficult to tell whether either of them has an advantage with two weeks left in the campaign.
Former B.C. MLA Terry Lake is running in Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo for the Liberal Party.
There will be seven names on the ballot in Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo in total, including recently named NDP candidate Cynthia Egli, the Greens’ Iain Currie, Ken Finlayson of the People’s Party of Canada, Communist party of Canada’s Peter Kerek and Kira Cheeseborough from a group called the Animal Protection Party of Canada.
A key element of the race, however, will be between the Conservatives and Liberals.
Targeting specific ridings they think they can switch appears to be a key Liberal strategy in this election to shore up potential losses elsewhere, said Hamish Telford, an associate professor in political science at the University of the Fraser Valley.
However, some of the controversies that followed Liberal Leader Trudeau from his first term in government may be liabilities for Lake.
“I would say the shine is off the rose of Justin Trudeau,” McLeod said.
While McLeod wasn’t surprised to see her margin of victory slide in 2015, the year that voters expressed their displeasure with then Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s government, this time around she maintains that on the doorsteps she hears from voters who regret their Liberal support.
“That’s the team (Lake) chose to join,” McLeod said of her well-known competitor. “That’s what I hear. ‘We liked him, but can’t support him with the team that he’s on.’”
Lake said that while he was a B.C. Liberal MLA, which is completely independent of the federal Liberal party, Kamloops voters have always known that he was on the liberal side of the provincial party’s coalition with conservatives.
Some of the key people who helped get Lake elected provincially are now working for his federal campaign, Lake said, and are working to get his supporters out to vote.
Lake said that he reminds voters that, because of the way the national election race is shaping up, “the Liberals have the best chance of forming government.”
“I tell people who say they could either vote Liberal or Conservative to consider me, really, if they think the Liberals have a good chance of being elected,” Lake said. “It would be nice to have a government MP for a strong voice in Ottawa.”
However, Green candidate Currie, a local Crown prosecutor, believes he has the momentum to sneak into a more competitive race with an opening created by the fact it took three tries for the NDP to nominate a candidate after the first two nominees stepped down.
The Greens only polled 3.6 per cent of the popular vote in 2015, but Currie said the party’s candidate ran a campaign encouraging voters to cast ballots for whoever they thought would beat Harper.
This time, Currie is making a run at the seat on a strong conviction for the Green party’s climate-action plan, and he is getting a lot of volunteers and a lot of signs on lawns.
“This time, I do think there is an appetite for real change,” Currie said. “I think people are not going to vote just because they recognize names on the ballot, and we’re offering a strong alternative.”
The riding’s electorate is weighted to the city of Kamloops, with a population over 90,000, but it sprawls northward into communities such as Clinton, 100 Mile House, Barriere and Clearwater that have been hit hard by sawmill shutdowns.