TORONTO

Two high-profile journalists won the right Sunday afternoon to compete to be Bob Rae's replacement as the MP for Toronto Centre.

The nomination fights in the riding were interesting enough but the battle to come in the byelection yet to be called will be a fascinating preview of the struggle we'll see on the political left in this country in the years leading up to the 2015 general election as New Democrats and Liberals jockey for the right to sell themselves as the one, true alternative to Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

For Thomas Mulcair's New Democrats, former Toronto Star columnist Linda McQuaig will carry the NDP flag and, for Justin Trudeau's Liberals, former Globe and Mail editor Chrystia Freeland was the winner.

The riding has been Liberal since 1993 and the New Democrats have never held it.

And while the Liberals are still the presumptive favourites to hold the riding, both Liberals and New Democrats believe the McQuaig versus Freeland fight to be a Battle Royale.

"The upcoming byelection in Toronto Centre is really going to be a bellwether as Canadians contemplate who can best lead this country in the post-Harper era," McQuaig said in a rabble-rousing, tub-thumping speech to nearly 400 New Democrats packed into a hot standing-room only auditorium at a downtown YMCA here.

Not surprisingly, McQuaig thinks Freeland, Trudeau and the Liberals stand only for more of the same.

"Freeland presents herself as a progressive ... but her writings reveal that she regards rising income inequality as inevitable, as something we really can't do anything about," McQuaig said. "I strongly disagree with that and, in my writings, I've demonstrated that rising inequality is not inevitable. Rather it's the direct result of the right-wing economic policies embraced by the Conservatives and the Liberals."

In the 2011 general election, this argument convinced enough "progressive" Liberals to desert Michael Ignatieff and vote for Jack Layton in the belief that Layton and the NDP, not Ignatieff and the Liberals, were a more credible alternative to Harper and the Tories.

The flip side to that was that a lot of "blue" Liberals were horrified at the thought that Layton might move in to 24 Sussex and, sensing that Ignatieff had no chance, held their nose and voted for Harper.

The challenge for Trudeau is that he must win back both the progressive Liberals and the "blue" Liberals who left the red team in 2011.

With Freeland in Toronto Centre, Trudeau's team will get a chance to road test some of the ideas they might use in 2015 to bring back both "blue" Liberals and "progressive" Liberals.

Freeland herself refused to respond to McQuaig's attack but one of Freeland's rivals for the Liberal nomination did. (Freeland had little more than bland bromides when asked about all of this Sunday.)

But Diana Burke, a former Bay Street banking executive who was running against Freeland had the best line of the day for Liberals angling to win back blue Liberals and still appeal to progressive voters.

"Thomas Mulcair's vision of Canada may be more generous than Harper's but it's also very naive. He simply (doesn't) understand the importance of creating wealth to support our generous instincts."

As for McQuaig and the NDP more generally, they have their own ideas on that.

"The Harper government is on the ropes so the focus is now turning to who will form the next government," McQuaig said. "Trudeau has the glitz but Mulcair has the substance, the brains and he has the commitment for a progressive Canada."

Toronto Centre has one of the richest neighbourhoods in Canada in Rosedale. Voters there love Burke's formulation for being a Liberal.

But the riding also has some of the poorest neighbourhoods in our biggest city. McQuaig and the NDP are hoping that if they can stoke enough frustration and anger, they can set the template for 2015.