London By-Election Tough to Call

There’s a by-election this Tuesday in the riding of London North Centre. It came about because the current MP Joe Fontana resigned his seat to run for mayor of London.

Apparently the race is too close (or difficult) to call. There are no opinion polls available, which makes for a refreshing lack of numeracy. It features a curious cast of candidates, including the federal leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May:

The former executive director of the Sierra Club is seeking the Green party’s first ever seat in the Commons, and acknowledges that the cheery goodwill she finds at most London doorsteps is a function of having no party past to criticize.

Then there’s the New Democrat candidate Megan Walker, who seems a bit chippy:

Walker, who began her campaign by calling Haskett “anti-women, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-equality but pro-George Bush,” accused Pearson of a corrupt Liberal coverup on the scale of the federal sponsorship scandal, then demanded a police investigation.

Another curiousity is the Conservative candidate Dianne Haskett, who’s apparently reluctant, having “barely campaigned after spending the last six years in Washington working for a Republican senator and a Christian advocacy group.” And check out this description of her campaign quarters:

Her tiny campaign office, unlike those of her chief rivals, is almost as far from downtown London as the riding boundary permits. Sandwiched in a seedy strip mall, the office is all but invisible from the road and was unheralded by even a single street sign the day a reporter paid an unannounced visit.

Then there’s the Liberal candidate, who had some bad luck with a blog:

His campaign spokesman, a conscripted Tory, was forced to quit Pearson’s campaign last week after New Democrats released excerpts from a now-defunct blog with some impolitic musings.

Pearson, a fire captain, food bank director and human rights worker, naively brought the blog to the attention of Walker, in hopes his NDP adversary would spare his campaign worker personal public humiliation.

She didn’t.

The London Free Press has a portal page for the election, which includes one-minute YouTube-esque (YouTubish?) videos of each candidate making their pitch.

UPDATE: It looks like the Liberal candidate won in London, though the vote was very split. The Green Party candidate came a respectable second:

With 240 of 253 polls reporting, Pearson had nearly 35 per cent of the vote, followed by May with 26 per cent and Tory Dianne Haskett, the former London mayor, with 24 per cent. May, a well-known environmental activist born in the United States, said the results showed the “progress and momentum” of a “party on the move.”