In writing “Casey at the Bat” E.L. Thayer spoke of the depth of disappointment felt by the people of Mudville when their champion is defeated. It is the same disappointment that we feel in Barrie when our mayor of the past 12 years, lost in a close race, in the provincial election.
But we have to agree with Thayer that our champion contributed to his own defeat. Casey let the first two strikes fly by—waiting for that perfect pitch. Our champion had to overcome the gerrymander of our riding. He had to address the predominance of conservatives and gun nuts in the rural area of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte electoral district here in middle Ontario.
It meant little to our country folk that Barrie’s mayor was chair of Ontario’s big cities mayors’ caucus. If anything, his strengths as a highly successful city mayor worked against him.
When I first met Jeff Lehman in 2009, he had been back in Canada from teaching at the London School of Economics for ten years. He had built a successful business advising cities across Canada. He had won a seat on council for my downtown ward in Barrie. He soon let me know that his objective at the time was the mayor’s job.
In a field that included the incumbent mayor, a former mayor, a former member of the legislature, another councillor and some other hopefuls, we got to work on the 2010 municipal election in Barrie. I ran the ground game for him. I was training volunteers, organizing and selecting polls for canvas. We did a lot of canvassing in the city over a hot summer. I saved the condominiums around the city for canvassing on the hottest days, to protect our canvassers from heat stroke.
I went canvassing with the candidate fairly often to help move him along and to get to know the city better. He is a strong canvasser but he could get delayed by voters with serious comments on conditions in the city.
But in the provincial campaign, he seemed to rely on his social media, city door knocking and voter identification for the win. He was some 600 votes short of a home run to the Ontario Legislature.
As Thayer said in the last stanza of Casey at the Bat:
“Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.”
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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