You’re probably thinking I’m referring to John Oglivie, who was endorsed by the Ottawa Citizen to represent Carleton-Mississippi-Mills and to defeat PC incumbent Norm Sterling. While that was news in of itself, the excitement around Green Party HQ is that their candidate in Bruce-Grey Owen Sound, Shane Jolley, has an excellent shot to unseat Bill Murdoch. You might remember Mr. Murdoch was the first PC MPP to come out publicly to dissent against Tory’s plan of faith-based school funding, and if these poll results that are being listed at the Greens page is accurate, you can see why - Jim Harris fills us in:
The poll by Oraclepoll shows:
Bill Murdoch, Progressive Conservative – 37%
Shane Jolley, Green Party of Ontario - 28%
Liberal - 21%
NDP- 13%
A shift of 4% of Murdoch’s support to Shane along with picking up just one point from the Liberals and NDP will see Shane win. And is accurate within 5.6% margin of error, 19 times out of 20.
In addition, the Owen Sound newspaper - the only one within that riding - has endorsed Mr. Jolley, and that is pretty significant. John Tory is in worse trouble then I thought if the Greens are this competitive in the bluest of blue Progressive Conservative seats.
Shane has down well before. What he does is work hard at the community level _all the time_. There’s a funny story he tells about visiting a tiny community and giving a speech to a small crowd of bridge players. They played as he spoke. When he was down there was scant applause.
After the following election, when reviewing which polls he did well in, he discovered there was one poll he took by a landslide, and it was that one. He was the only candidate who ever stopped there.
Anyway, the GPO’s deputy leader, Victoria Serda is from around there as well and is in municipal office. And don’t forget that Owen Sound is not that far from Walkerton.