Why Lisa MacLeod Changes Everything

The question isn't whether Lisa MacLeod wins. It's what her candidacy does to everyone else.

This is a column I wasn’t planning to write. But Lisa MacLeod, the former Ontario cabinet minister and Progressive Conservative MPP for Nepean who spent almost two decades at Queen’s Park, has forced my hand. She’s now the political elephant in the Ottawa election room.

This is either a very clever political tease or a very real thing.

If it’s a real thing, the Ottawa contest may turn into the most unpredictable mayoral race in Ontario this October. That’s saying something.

If MacLeod decides to file her nomination papers before the late August deadline, she will instantly scramble the entire Ottawa mayoral race. I’ve said this before. I just never thought it was a possibility. Her musings this week on Facebook — will she or won’t she? — are themselves having a predictable political effect: people are talking about the Ottawa election during the summer campaign doldrums.

This is an election, as I have been chronicling in this newsletter, that offers few exciting races given that most observers expect almost all incumbent councillors seeking re-election — that would be 22 out of 24 — to be re-elected and maybe a few even acclaimed. That prospect doesn’t exactly ramp up voter motivation and could depress turnout, which, as we know, usually helps incumbents.

The mayoral race was going to be another sleeper — a cakewalk for Mayor Mark Sutcliffe until Alex Lawson showed up in January, seemingly out of the blue (pun intended).

Now MacLeod is telling the Mayor very publicly and directly, someone whom she says she knows well and who “is a kind and decent man,” that she may try to take his job.

I’ll just quote her Facebook post from July 22, a day after posting what she frames as a non-political announcement: “It seems my last post struck a nerve. More than 19,000 people viewed it…given my extensive political executive background and given the decisions I may or may not make in late August, I want you to know that I’m reading your comments carefully.”

All this after she swore up and down in the past several months that she had no intention of running. That was then; this is now.

Pollster David Coletto, who has turned into a very prominent public surrogate for the Mayor, has been saying for months that there’s nothing to see here (i.e., there’s no real challenge to the Mayor) because polling shows Sutcliffe still very comfortably ahead of his nearest rivals. MacLeod, who has been one of Ottawa’s most seasoned politicians, may make Coletto’s contention harder to maintain — subject, of course, to validation by aggregating the findings of multiple credible polls. Let’s remember, when David Valentin, principal at Liaison Strategies, tested Tim Tierney’s candidacy for mayor in his first Ottawa Compass Capital Tracker poll in April, the Councillor for Beacon Hill-Cyrville was instantly a contender.

It’s highly unlikely that MacLeod would have posted what I’m going to call a “manifesto” of sorts on her Facebook page last Tuesday if she wasn’t seeing what everyone else is seeing. There is a thirst for change, though, as I’ve said previously, this has not veered into city-wide outrage. Nonetheless, the incumbent Mayor is vulnerable. MacLeod has a good line to illustrate what’s wrong with the management of Canada’s capital: “world class shouldn’t be a stretch goal.”

There’s blood in this city’s political waters. It has been there for some time. Not in all wards. The Mayor has a seam of core voters in the suburbs who will stick with him no matter what. What has changed is that Sutcliffe is not guaranteed a second term. The Jim Watson mayoral playbook won’t work with Lisa MacLeod and Alex Lawson pulling the political carpet out from under him. Sutcliffe’s inner circle knows this.

I’ll give you one big reason why MacLeod could scramble the race.

It concerns the July edition of Valentin’s Capital Tracker poll, which was released last week. (I’ll have more to say about this campaign’s polling in a later column.) You can be sure that all campaign-affiliated pollsters are now testing MacLeod’s viability.

“Losing is the new winning” was the headline of the article in iPolitics that reported the poll’s findings. Huh? How could the Mayor be winning by losing? Valentin explained that although Sutcliffe’s support has fallen from 46 per cent to 36 per cent in four months (the loss), there’s a widening gap — ten points — separating him from his nearest rivals, Lawson and Jeff Leiper, who are essentially tied at 26 per cent and 25 per cent respectively. That’s a win for Sutcliffe. (For the record, Coletto strongly challenges Valentin’s data, which has Lawson surging to second place.)

But let’s look at what’s happening here more closely. You have to ask yourself — as Coletto’s peers in the polling community are asking themselves — should an incumbent Mayor without any personal scandals be polling at only 36 per cent? Valentin himself posed this question when I talked to him this week. The Mayor’s performance is slightly up in the eyes of Ottawa residents from the June poll, but he’s still under water on this metric.

A real problem for Mark Sutcliffe is the still-high number of undecideds (over 30 per cent) in July. Valentin tells me that this is a unique feature of the Ottawa mayoral election (which started with 50 per cent undecideds) compared to other mayoral races. Those undecideds have likely made up their minds about the Mayor after almost four years, but they don’t yet know which of the challengers will get their vote. For the Mayor to maintain his lead in the mid-30s until election day, the undecideds have to break for him in the same proportion going forward (call it one in three voters). This is why some close observers with polling experience see a vulnerable Mayor whose support could slip below 35 per cent in the next 30 days if the apparent Lawson surge continues.

Now put Lisa MacLeod’s potential candidacy into the mix and we’re in a completely different polling world come September. I feel that we may be looking at the proverbial football bounce, in which no one can predict the trajectory of the kicked football once it hits the grass. It’s a neat metaphor for what may happen if she enters the race.

Who is one of the biggest beneficiaries of MacLeod’s entry? Well, to my mind, that would be Neil Saravanamuttoo. He’d be singin’ in the rain, so to speak. While everyone is calculating the Mayor’s likelihood of survival in a brawl for the centre-right vote, Saravanamuttoo would be left alone to gather more and more Jeff Leiper votes on the centre-left. That could change if the Leiper campaign has a rebound in the polling, which is entirely possible as we are at the halfway point of a long official campaign.

I’m sure that Lisa MacLeod’s fixes for what is ailing our city aren’t going to be radically different from those proposed by Lawson, Leiper and Saravanamuttoo. There’s more that unites these challengers than separates them. But what she possesses — love her or hate her — is a distinct and powerful political brand. This is where Leiper’s thus far cautious campaign is falling down, unless he’s been gradually pocketing those 40,000 irregular voters I keep banging on about who won’t show up in the public polling but will show up on election day for him.

At this stage, it’s impossible to speculate exactly how MacLeod would scramble the race except that you could end up with a scenario in which Ottawa’s Mayor on October 26 could be elected with only around 30–32 per cent of the vote.

There will be strategic voting.

Lisa MacLeod will turn the flashing yellow lights surrounding the Sutcliffe campaign into red ones.

Even if she decides not to run after testing the waters, she can now turn into a powerful ally for one of Sutcliffe’s challengers.

She may have inserted herself into the 2026 mayoral race at just the right time.

And, if MacLeod gets in the race, Saravanamuttoo’s ability to be kingmaker/queenmaker also becomes more of a real thing since it is highly probable that the margin separating the Mayor from his nearest rival in early October will be less than 10 per cent.

The city awaits Lisa MacLeod’s decision.

Evan H. Potter