Sutcliffe Brands His Opponents Radicals: POTTER

By Evan Potter

A recent email to supporters gives away the game. “We have a big decision to make,” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe tells his email list. “Ottawa needs a steady hand and a smart plan that brings everyone together, not a sharp turn to the far left or the far right.”

Read that sentence twice and you can see the whole Sutcliffe campaign in miniature. It is doing two jobs at once. The word “together” – which appears four times in Sutcliffe’s narrative and might have been focus-group tested – does a lot of work, too.