When Bob Rae, the former NDP Premier of Ontario, is running in the Toronto Centre by-election to replace retired MP Bill Graham’s place in the Liberal Party, it figures that the sparring partners are just as improbable.

Seated alongside Rae in the parish hall of St. Simon-the-Apostle Anglican Church at Bloor and Parliament on Wednesday night: Conservative candidate Don Meredith, a black Baptist minister in Richmond Hill who abruptly replaced another black candidate, Mark Warner, dumped last fall by Stephen Harper for straying from the national marketing message; Chris Tindal, a 26-year-old environmental activist with a scrappy mod haircut who, by virtue of running for the Greens, gets attention from those seeking a fresh default, as he records the experience for his blog; and, for one night only, filling in for NDP candidate El-Farouk Khaki, the sitting MP from one riding over — Trinity-Spadina MP Olivia Chow.

While the church is right across the street from the mansions of Rosedale, this is the St. James Town debate, and many of the 100 in attendance seem fraught by some struggle or another. Carl Hiaasen has written entire novels with less of a premise to work with than this showcase showdown between the ex-NDPer Rae and party-lifer Chow, given how she was a prime mover on committees that helped steer him in the big chair at Queen’s Park in 1990. This is like Hillary vs. Obama, Toronto Centre-style, but it’s unclear which is which.

Heck, it’s impossible to grasp what exactly the debate is about — the state of the world from the POV of lower-income downtown Canada, maybe? Perhaps, once upon a time, the diversity of candidates in the race would say something about multiculturalism, but that’s so 20th century and, besides — to quote then-Premier Rae’s attempt to write a feel-good CanCon jingle — they’re in the same boat now.

Just from their postures, no one would ever guess Chow and Rae were ever on the same team. She’s got more fiery talking points than ever at age 50, while looking forever 33, but the proto-hipster socialist rhetoric isn’t bulletproof, either — Chow’s assistant and hand-picked successor, Helen Kennedy, was handily trounced by Adam Vaughan in the 2006 municipal election.

The remodeled Rae, liberated of corrective eye-wear since being defeated as premier in 1995, maintains an authoritatively parted coif that’d make any television anchorman wonder where he could buy one, too. But, running for office for the first time in over a dozen years at age 59, he’s also been reunited with University of Toronto frenemy Michael Ignatieff. Maybe the celebrity-academic elitism that made Ignatieff look awkward while trudging around the dowdy subdivisions and donut shops of his Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding also risks being projected on Rae — alongside four candidates, Rae looks like a Goliath trying to fold himself into the passenger seat of a MINI convertible. His crossed-over leg spends much of the debate swinging like a metronome.

“Politics really matters,” asserts Rae at the outset. “It matters to your children, and your grandchildren.” And it obviously matters to him too, right?

The first question from the floor concerns gentrification. Chow knows about how this can impact homelessness — her husband Jack Layton wrote a book about it, although she apologizes for the gratuitous plug. Defending her own efforts on Parliament Hill during the past two years — again, any eavesdropper wouldn’t have a clue what the debate was for — Chow makes repeated reference to “Jack Layton’s NDP,” either a dig at the fact that she isn’t working for “Bob Rae’s NDP,” or a re-branding mission along the lines of Steve Harper’s “Canada’s New Government.”

Wait, was there not a candidate representing the party of the Prime Minister? Don Meredith, the 43-year-old who works to break the cycle of violence among black youth as chairman of the GTA Faith Alliance, boasts of first-hand experience on the dark side of Bob Rae’s NDP’s devotion to social housing. Remedies: job creation, limited social dependency, less of those darn taxes, etc.

Chris Tindal, meanwhile, isn’t particularly sheepish about having to agree with Rae most of the time — except for feigning enthusiasm for Liberal leader Stephane Dion, especially after being in Ottawa earlier this week to watch the passage of the federal budget: “Dion gets up to say how this budget is terrible, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep … and we’re going to vote for it anyway. This is not a time for mediocrity.” Tindal is predisposed to speaking passionately about stuff like the carbon tax, and his net gain in this race should be the greatest of all.

But the St. James Town meeting was also a reminder of what questions are raised to federal candidates on the wrong side of the tracks: child abuse in the Anglican Church (like the one in which the debate was taking place); the issue of transphobia raised by an apparent victim; not to mention the matter of bedbugs.
 
Somewhere along the way, Rae constructs a bridge between Chow’s exasperation, Meredith’s preaching and Tindal’s smirk. His best oratory of the bunch goes something like this: “I’m begging you, please don’t persist in the idea that every time you give money to the government that you’re throwing it away.”

The question is, why does a riding overwhelmingly owned by Bill Graham and the Liberal Party for five elections in a row need to be begged? Fear of “Jack Layton’s NDP” spreading the message that Rae is a political schizophrenic?

“I wouldn’t have ever supported him had I known all along that he really was a Liberal,” says Chow afterward to the one reporter — and two editorial interns — bearing witness to her cameo appearance. “We already felt betrayed by him during the time he was Premier, when he couldn’t come up with a decent child-care program. Rae doesn’t have the courage of his convictions, and when you don’t know what side you’re on, you’re in for a tough going.

“Being a Liberal means you’re trying to please everybody, and so you don’t know whose side you’re on. Gary Doer, Tommy Douglas, Lorne Calvert — those NDP premiers didn’t become Liberals. But I’m used to dealing with Liberals by now.”

And then Chow wondered aloud if she came off as a bit too riled up for this room.

 
RAE ASSAILS "CHEAP RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA"
The action shifts 24 hours later, just a few blocks and another world away, through the maze that leads to Rosedale United Church. Once again, no E-Farouk Khaki to debate for the NDP, but no Olivia Chow, either — just a female campaign staffer who speed-mumbles through a prepared statement on his behalf before leaving the podium to the other main candidates.
 
Questions at this meeting, attended by roughly 100 hundred people, are technically limited to members of the five ratepayer organizations putting it on — registered voters aged 18 and over, please, as past debates apparently had people sending their kids up to the mic.

“I have so much respect for Don and Chris for what they do in their respective areas that I wouldn’t want to take them away from any of that,” demurs Rae. “But, apparently, I have been a rising star in five different decades.”

Rae concedes he’s moving into the neighbourhood — hey, if he’s lucky, he’ll run into Creative Class neighbour Richard Florida in the ravines — once some home renovations are complete. Constituents around here can relate.

And, rather than bedbugs, the topics raised for discussion reflect the demographic. The challenges of exporting trade, the municipal government’s taxation powers or lack thereof, whether Barack Obama will quickly nix NAFTA. Granted, the topic of troops in Afghanistan is raised for the second night in row — giving Rae a chance to be unrepentantly ambivalent — along with questions on Canada’s perspective on the War on Terror and the Middle East.

The foreign-policy dialogue also provides an entrance for Canadian Action Party candidate Doug Plumb — whose campaign manager's official web address is a MySpace page — to heckle about Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which visibly rankled Rae. (Plumb was not invited to participate in either debate, nor was Animal Alliance candidate Liz White and NeoRhino candidate Zeeshan Baig.)

Rosedale had Rae more pensive than the St. James Town setting. Seated between Meredith and Tindal, he projected the inevitable blend of confidence and humility. Revealed in the process was his motivation for even bothering.

Meredith’s campaign literature includes a flier that contrasts Stephen Harper’s TOUGH ON CRIME stance with quotes from The Globe and Mail that make Stephane Dion out to be a SOFT ON CRIME buffoon.

“This is one of the most offensive things I’ve ever seen,” shouted Rae at opponent Meredith. “And for this party to be called Conservative, in the tradition of Bill Davis, when they’re really just the old Reform or Alliance — they should be ashamed of themselves. It’s just cheap right-wing propaganda. Putting out literature saying that my leader is weak on crime when I don’t have a note of denunciation against your leader? I think it’s shameful.”  

Somewhere in all that lies an explanation about what this by-election is “about.”

A lifelong Liberal woman who lived outside of the country from 1993 to 2005 asks how Rae was an NDP premier when she left and a Liberal leadership hopeful when she returned: “I felt like I was in the twilight zone,” she says.

This was a too-perfect opportunity for Rae to explain: “Being in government is about making difficult choices, and those choices have to be made. Fundamentally, the NDP has not been comfortable in dealing with those choices.” So, vote Liberal because they’re better than what’s there today, a reverse-takeover of the Conservatives, who are only in power because all the votes against them are at the risk of being split beyond repair.

The Toronto Centre roadshow has three more stops prior to March 17, a St. Patrick’s Day election. Debates will provide an opportunity to witness all of the above, and more, like Bob Rae’s intriguing facial calisthenics.

And, if nothing else comes out of Bob Rae’s re-ascent to Ottawa — he was MP for what is now Jack Layton’s Broadview riding from 1978 through 1982 — the process has created some online content for Chris Tindal.

“Stick with it,” a self-described “maverick” Rosedale resident bluntly admonished Tindal at the end of the evening. “And get a new haircut.” 

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