Simcoe North stays Tory but no bounce for Brown

Eight is enough candidates to vie for the vacant seat in Simcoe North Ontario this early September, upon the sudden resignation of Garfield Dunlop for a quite arguably unnecessary provincial byelection, in the middle of a similarly quite arguably unnecessarily long federal election campaign. These candidates are the Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario Leader Patrick Brown, Ontario Liberal Party candidate Fred Larsen, Ontario New Democratic Party candidate Elizabeth Van Houtte, Green Party of Ontario candidate Valerie Powell, Ontario Libertarian Party candidate Darren Roskam, the Leader of the New Reform Party of Ontario James Gault, the Founder of the Peoples Political Party of Ontario Kevin Clarke, the Founder and Leader of the Pauper Party of Ontario John Turmel, all having been campaigning and debating for almost one whole month. Already the federal campaign has made the Ontario fight one between Grit Premier Kathleen Wynne by extension for the federal Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau and the Prime Minister of Canada and Conservative Party of Canada leader Stephen Harper who previously counted provincial Ontario Tory leader Patrick Brown amongst his backbench in the House of Commons, thus naturally the Ontario Tories and Grits have found their red versus blue narrative easy to use on the campaign trail so far.

But the New Democrats, amongst the other four third parties vying for space, are the ones with the Orange Crush federally that seem to speak to a lack of mandate by Premier Wynne and her Ontario Liberal government in decisions amongst them being the creation of an Ontario Real Retirement Pension Plan and the privatized sellout of Hydro Ontario without any mention publically thereof during the last provincial election by Kathleen and company just a little more than a year ago.

That said expect the normal 50,474 valid total voters from the 2014 general election to drop by around half, as it usually does for byelections and especially ones called during the summer, but in so far as results I think politicos will be excited and yet expectant at the same time when they come after the third of September. Brown and his Tories will gain 47.0% and win the seat, Van Houtte and the New Democrats will respectfully get 23.1 percent of the vote for a second place showing, Larsen and the Grits will place third with 21.9 in percentage, as Powell and the Greens will maintain fourth with 5.6%, plus Gault, the leader of New Reform, fifth with 1.3%, also Roskam and the Libertarians finishing sixth with 0.7%, then Clarke, the founder of the Peoples, finishing seventh with 0.3%, and finally Turmel, the leader and founder of the Pauper, finishing eighth with 0.05%. So at the end of the day, Simcoe North stays Tory but no bounce for Brown as he would like mainly because he did not heed the advice of Wynne in the first place, but maybe he likes it like that as Patrick continues to sneak under the radar and flip over the expectations held out for him by the critics at current.