Toronto – This is a federal election, so why are so many people more identified with Ontario politics popping up all over it?
Former New Democrat premier Bob Rae, who defected to the federal Liberals partly because they win more elections, has been assigned a featured role because leader Stephane Dion has failed to appeal to voters and the party wants to demonstrate instead it has a strong team.
The former premier has spoken at rallies as far away as Vancouver, where he made a plea that must have made New Democrats fume even more.
Rae urged his former comrades to rally behind the Liberals because theirs is the only party with a chance of defeating fearsome Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, while a vote for the NDP would be wasted.
Rae resorted to a tactic he deplored when he led the provincial New Democrats and rivals urged them to vote to keep out the party they disliked most, rather than for the party they preferred, or vote strategically, as they tried to sugar-coat it.
Rae must have irretrievably lost any friends in his former party. But polls suggest he is strengthening his base for another run for federal Liberal leader, if Dion fails dismally.
Gerard Kennedy, the former Ontario Liberal education minister running federally, also is being pictured prominently as another in Dion’s team.
But Dion is leader because Kennedy threw crucial support to him at a leadership convention and Kennedy could be burdened in the next leadership race for having poor judgment.
Three former Ontario Conservatives who switched to become senior ministers under Harper are very much in the federal campaign, whether they want to be or not.
Jim Flaherty, once premier Mike Harris’s deputy premier and now Harper’s finance minister, is being attacked by federal Liberal ads for having said Ontario’s tax rates are too high and implying he could understand why businesses are reluctant to invest in the province.
Tony Clement, another minister under both Harris and Harper, is being criticized because he was at the Democratic Party convention in Denver, watching Barack Obama being chosen candidate for president, and unavailable to answer questions about one of the biggest tainted food concerns in history, involving Maple Leaf Foods.
John Baird, a minister under Harris and now Harper’s environment minister, is being targeted by the federal Liberals as a key proponent of downsizing and privatizing government that weakened food and water protection disastrously in Ontario.
Liberals in the legislature have been quick to seize opportunities to disparage the federal Conservatives since the election was called.
Premier Dalton McGuinty has complained his government could cut more taxes, train more workers and build more infrastructure if the Harper government would allow it to keep more of the revenue it collects in Ontario, although there is no sign this will develop into the influential issue McGuinty wants.
Ontarians are more involved in this federal election for a variety of reasons, but one is there is a federal government that provides more targets to shoot at.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen's Park press gallery.
