In a rare moment of unity, four mayoral campaigns have joined together in bewilderment over a planned debate that will exclude Karen Stintz and David Soknacki but include Sarah Thomson.

The debate is being held Monday morning by the University of Toronto’s community radio station, CIUT 89.5 FM. Thomson, who ran for mayor in 2010 but dropped out before voting day, hosted a weekly show on that station for several months until she launched her campaign in late March.

The debate organizer is station manager Ken Stowar, who wrote in a news release that he was “inviting the top four candidates in the race.” But he did not invite Stintz, who is fourth in every public poll.

“I’m disappointed,” Stintz said in an interview. “I would have loved to have been able to speak directly to the students at U of T. But ultimately, the organizers are going to decide how they want their debate.”

Soknacki, polling in fifth, was belatedly invited on Thursday, and he confirmed his attendance. But on Friday morning, the station wrote on Twitter that the participants would be Thomson and frontrunners Olivia Chow, Rob Ford and John Tory.

Asked on Wednesday about the then-apparent exclusion of Soknacki, Stowar said, “We'll be hosting more than one debate. This is the first of many with different candidates.”

He did not respond to additional questions from the Star on Friday, and campaign organizers say he has been difficult to reach even by them.

Both the Soknacki and Chow campaigns for the Oct. 27 mayoral election complained about the inclusion of Thomson at the expense of Soknacki and Stintz.

“We have concerns that two candidates who have held public office appear to not be participants in this debate, and we think they should be there,” said Chow spokesman Jamey Heath.

Soknacki spokeswoman Supriya Dwivedi said, “The circus isn’t going away any time soon, I guess. Because in no reality is Sarah Thomson one of the top four candidates.”

Tory’s campaign is also confused. Spokeswoman Amanda Galbraith said, “We welcome all of the candidates in the debate, and we made that clear to the organizers.”

Thomson, a businesswoman who publishes a magazine called Women’s Post, polled as high as 17 per cent in 2010 before falling below 10 per cent and withdrawing from the race.

She registered this year on March 20 — arriving at city hall in a horse-drawn carriage, after the five primary candidates had already launched their campaigns — and has struggled to seize the spotlight in a race with the high-powered Tory, Ford and Chow plus a former TTC chair in Stintz and a former budget chief in Soknacki. She was excluded from the first televised debate.

“I’m glad I’m finally being included,” Thomson said on Friday.

Thomson claimed that her campaign’s internal polls have showed her ahead of Stintz, who has earned between 5 and 7 per cent support in recent public polls. She noted that she is running television ads on CP24, and she said she is receiving “a ton” of small donations; voters, she said, know she is not the “fringe candidate” some in the media say she is.

“Something’s happening. I don’t know what it is — whether people are just feeling sorry for me because I’m not being included, I don’t know, but it’s working, and I like it,” Thomson said.

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She said she does not know debate organizer Stowar well.

“What we found is, on the street, people are coming up to me saying, ‘How come you weren’t at the debate, how come you weren’t at the debate?’ And so I think probably that the response from organizations like CIUT and other people — I’m getting the same thing from them. They’re like, ‘Why aren’t you at the debate? That’s not fair.’ ”

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