Leiper Needs A Big Beautiful Idea: POTTER

By Evan H. Potter

Let’s not overthink this. Kitchissippi Councilor Jeff Leiper will become Ottawa’s new mayor if he can hold three-quarters of former mayoral candidate Catherine McKenney’s 119,241 votes from their 2022 campaign and then find 50,000 more from residents who didn’t bother to show up at the polls the last time.

That number isn’t fanciful and it doesn’t include grabbing thousands of swing voters in Orléans, Nepean, Kanata and Stittsville who are having second thoughts about Mayor Mark Sutcliffe. But in Ottawa, you don’t get from here to there with a standard-issue municipal campaign. You get there with a Get Out the Vote organizational effort of historic proportions.

Which is another way of saying that if Leiper’s campaign team is going to pull this off, their candidate will have to capture between 46 to 50 per cent of the vote. Leiper’s campaign won’t look like a typical Ottawa municipal race at all. It will be bigger, noisier, and far more organized and decentralized than anything we’ve seen before. It will be less polite. And for a while, it seemed that kind of effort might culminate in a simple, head-to-head showdown.

Just a few short months ago, I thought Ottawa could yet stage its own municipal remake of the classic movie, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), minus the leather and three-dimensional cage-like arena. Before the arrival of candidates Neil Saravanamuttoo and Alexander Lawson, the mayoral race looked like it could collapse into a sort-of cinematic duel between the mayor and Leiper. As they say in the movie: Two men enter, one man leaves.

It was a comforting narrative. For Sutcliffe, it meant a familiar incumbent-versus-challenger script, one that his team thought he could win easily. For Leiper, it offered some clarity on what he had to do to walk out of the cage: seize control of the city-wide conversation, show a sharp contrast with the mayor, prosecute his case relentlessly, and hope that a large enough bloc of suburban voters had grown disillusioned with Sutcliffe’s performance and were ready for a change.

That version of the contest is now gone. What we have instead is a more crowded cage match, with four prospective candidates circling one another and the electorate still barely paying attention. This complicates things for everyone, but not equally.