Etobicoke North candidates blame election problems for losses
The candidates of the Etobicoke North riding blame a historic electoral challenge, a flawed voting system and strategic voting for their landslide loss to the Liberal Party.
Liberal MP Kirsty Duncan entered her third term with 62 per cent of the vote. Her closest competitor, Conservative candidate Toyin Dada, managed to only get 23.7 per cent of the vote and NDP candidate Faisal Hassan obtained just 12.3 per cent.
The Green Party’s Akhtar Ayub, independent candidate George Szebik, and Marxist-Leninist candidate Anna Di Carlo collectively only got two per cent of the vote.
Dada, whose party lost their majority government, said she thought the election would be difficult to win.
“In more than a century, nobody has won a fourth straight election and we knew that we faced a monumental historical challenge,” she said in a Facebook post after the election.
Di Carlo said that a flawed election process led to a Liberal victory.
“Canada’s political establishment engineered the results that they wanted,” she said.
She also said that when polls showed that it looked like the Liberals had a chance to defeat the Conservatives, strategic voters hopped to their side.
“Canadians were okay with the Conservative agenda, what they didn’t like was Harper’s extremism,” she said.
Di Carlo did say that Trudeau’s Liberals embody Canadian values more than former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, but also said both parties felt too similar.
Hassan said on Twitter that the election results were “extremely disappointing.”
Despite that, he left a positive message on Facebook, saying that “over the last 78 days we have trained the next generation of leaders and community activists who will continue on with our message of love, hope, and optimism.”
Green Party leader Elizabeth May agrees with Di Carlo’s idea that strategic voting played a large role in the election. In her speech on election night, she told the crowd, “people who wanted to vote Green shouldn’t, couldn’t, would be bad people if they did… it was simply not possible to imagine this country enduring a single second more of Stephen Harper’s policies.”
Despite losing their spot as the official opposition, NDP leader Tom Mulcair smiled and said he was happy for the Liberal win, saying that “Canadians have turned the page on ten long years and they reject the politics of fear and division.”
He was also proud of the progress that the NDP made, saying that the NDP ran with more female and indigenous candidates than any other party in the history of Canada.
Neither George Szebik or Akhtar Ayub could be reached for comment.
About the Author
Taylor Clysdale is a passionate writer, poet, and gamer whose grand aspirations include becoming an investigative journalist. Favorite movies include Pulp Fiction and Alien.
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