OTTAWA—Veteran Ottawa city Councillor Marianne Wilkinson won’t make any predictions about who will take Kanata-Carleton in Thursday’s provincial election.

“I can’t call this one,” said Wilkinson, who has been involved in Kanata politics for decades.

Wilkinson’s hesitance to pick a winner in the riding is understandable. There are plenty question marks in the newly-redrawn riding, which covers parts of the suburban community of Kanata as well as a number of more rural communities.

The riding was created in 2012, largely based on the former riding of Carleton-Mississippi Mills. The former riding had been as close to a safe Progressive Conservative seat as they come in this province, held by the PCs for more than a decade.

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That changed with Jack MacLaren. After a string of embarrassing gaffes made headlines, MacLaren was booted from the PC caucus by former leader Patrick Brown. MacLaren disputed Brown’s version of events, saying he left of his own volition to join the fledgling Trillium Party.

MacLaren is running under the Trillium banner this time around, creating the potential to split the conservative vote between himself and PC candidate Merrilee Fullerton, a family physician and lifelong Kanata resident.

Neither MacLaren nor Fullerton responded to interview requests.

For the New Democrats, John Hansen is making his third run for elected office. Hansen is an engineer by trade, has worked in Kanata’s high-tech hub and lived in the community for more than 30 years.

Hansen said transportation and transit is one of the main issues he has heard while going door-to-door in the riding.

“One thing that resonates with everybody, believe it or not, is bus service. Transportation in general,” said Hansen, who ran for the federal NDP in 2015’s ill-fated campaign.

“Whether it’s there’s too much congestion in my neighbourhood early in the morning, or I can’t get a late bus because there isn’t bus service, or I can’t drive anymore, I need some transportation mechanism.”

Kanata-Carleton and its predecessor ridings have not been kind to the New Democrats. But Hansen noted that in 2015, the federal Liberals were able to win it from the Conservatives. Hansen is hoping for a similar dynamic provincially: progressive voters coalescing behind one party, in this case the NDP, to unseat an unpopular government.

“We’re seeing a much stronger dynamic now that is very, very positive,” Hansen said.

Kanta-Beaverbrook Community Association president Neil Thomson said it’s a possibility, but he’s seen a lot of support for the two conservatives in the race.

“I think people are going well jeeze, you know, we’ve got a split vote between either Ford or Jack MacLaren. And the way Jack was talking, he could see all these issues but couldn’t promise anything,” Thompson, who moderated an all-party debate in the riding, said.

“But certainly there’s very strong support … You see a lot of Jack MacLaren signs in the rural areas. But certainly in town, at the meeting, there was strong applause of Merilee Fullerton.”

Thomson, who said he has no partisan affiliation, said that some conservative-inclined voters have expressed hesitation over putting PC Leader Doug Ford in the premier’s office.

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“The people I talk to, I’m the head of the community association, it’s like ‘Merillee is OK, but Ford?’ I mean you get a lot of that.”

Wilkinson, the longtime councillor, agreed.

“I’ve heard people say (to Fullerton) ‘I’d like to vote for you but I can’t with Ford there,’” said Wilkinson, saying her best guess is that Kanata-Carleton will be a toss up between the Liberals and Conservatives.

The Green party has tapped Andrew West, a local lawyer, to run for the party. West said the No. 1 thing he hears from Kanata-Carleton residents on the doorstep is they’d like to vote Green — but likely won’t.

“Most voters are only seeing three choices. And they would like another alternative, but the question is if it will make a difference,” West said in an interview.

That urban-rural split Thomson identified is pronounced in Kanata-Carleton. The community of Kanata was home to Ottawa’s once-booming tech sector, and was hit hard when that bubble burst in the early 2000s. It’s been gradually recovering since the heydays of Nortel and Corel.

But the riding is also home to communities such as Carp and Dunrobin, smaller communities surrounded by farmland.

Unsurprisingly, the two sides of that split have different priorities. Stephanie Maghnam, the Liberal candidate for the riding, said rural residents are pushing for more support for the agricultural sector and a larger focus on rural affairs. For urban residents, Maghnam said, transportation issues such as extending Ottawa’s future light rail line to Kanata take priority.

“We want to reach as many folks as possible,” Maghnam said, when asked if her challenge was convincing those rural residents to vote Liberal.

“The rural residents have been incredibly receptive to having a Liberal represent them. They know that we have a very good working relationship with our federal partners, our municipal partners.”

When asked if the Liberal party’s poor showing in province-wide polls is making things more difficult for her, Maghnam, an entrepreneur and former reporter, said the Liberal organization in Kanata-Carleton is still strong.

“The provincial polls are not reflective of what’s happening here on the ground,” Maghnam said. “Here in the Ottawa area, the Liberals continue to have a very big stronghold here, and in Kanata in particular with the new electoral boundary, we went Liberal in the 2015 (federal) election.”

“This is going to be a very interesting election to pay attention to here.”

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