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Monday, January 09, 2006

edmonton strath-to-the-cona.

Last night, along with Mr. Robertson and Mr. Smith, we attended the Edmonton Strathcona candidate forum held at the Knox Metropolitan United Church. Though it wasn't the most exciting forum, we do have some thoughts...

1. Tory candidate Rahim Jaffer, the three-time incumbent for the riding was a no-show at the forum. Mr. Jaffer was joined in the no-show category by Marijuana Party candidate Dave Dowling... was Mr. Jaffer too busy campaigning for Tory candidates in Ontario to show up to a forum in his own riding?

2. Liberal candidate Andy Hladyshevsky was the most polished speaker. He was calm, cool, and humerous at times. For the most part, we would have a hard time disagreeing with many of the things he said.

3. Marxist-Leninist candidate, Kevan Hunter was great entertainment. His answer to nearly every question, ranging from Kyoto to committing 0.7% GDP to International Development Aid had something to do with Canada's "illegal occupation of Haiti..." crazy Marxist. :-P

4. Progressive Canadian candidate Mike Fedeyko was a pretty good speaker, though he slightly misjudged the crowd when he started quoting a Fraser Institute report...

5. Green Party candidate Cameron Wakefield was okay. Not the most polished speaker, he wasn't able to compensate oratorical for the Green Party's lack of solid policies...

6. NDP candidate Linda Duncan was a good speaker. Though we're most likely going to vote for her come January 23rd, we were not overly impressed with her performance at the forum. But it's nothing against her personally, none of the candidates really impressed us.

Overall, it was a pretty tame forum, we're looking forward to the next Edmonton Strathcona forum at the Myer Horowitz Theatre on the U of A Campus on January 11 at 5:30pm - tell your friends and show up!

So, ending it off, here are our current predictions in the Edmonton Strathcona race (rounded off, of course)...

Rahim Jaffer, CPC - 18,000
Linda Duncan, NDP - 13,000-14,000
Andy Hladyshevsky, Lib - 12,000-13,000
Cameron Wakefield, Grn - 3,000-4,000
Dave Dowling, MP -500
Mike Fedeyko, PC - 400
Kevan Hunter, ML - 100

3 comments:

Sean Tisdall said...

You're just basing that on my humiliating edging by the MP.

Sean Tisdall

Nastyboy said...

I'm planning on going to the one at U of A as well. I swung by Mr. Jafers and Linda Duncan's offices on the week end, Both will be at the forum on Wednesday.

I'll be there too.

daveberta said...

yeah, we're predicting the vote spliting will unfortunately let Mr. Jaffer again scrounge through with 30-40% of the vote...