Alan Riddell is a bilingual labour relations lawyer and partner with the law firm of Soloway Wright LLP in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. [1] He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and France's Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris. While still a student, he worked for Progressive Conservative Party of Canada Senator and Foreign Affairs Critic Heath MacQuarrie, and later in the office of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. As a young lawyer he successfully argued a number of high-profile cases, including the landmark decision of Dagg v. Minister of Finance in the Supreme Court of Canada, which defined the privacy rights of federal public servants under Canada's new Access to Information Act .
In March 2004, Riddell was approached by the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) to run as its candidate in the riding of Ottawa South, which was being vacated by Deputy Prime Minister, John Manley. He handily defeated others, including former Ottawa mayoralty candidate Terry Kilrea, for the 2004 CPC nomination. In the ensuing election, he ran against two nationally known names: David McGuinty, the younger brother of Ontario Liberal Party Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Monia Mazigh, of the New Democratic Party (NDP), best known as the wife of wrongfully imprisoned Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar. Although the riding was traditionally Liberal, it was thought that Riddell's background and dynamism, together with voter backlash against Liberal broken promises, gave him a good chance of winning. [2]
By the middle of the campaign, Riddell began to lead McGuinty and Mazigh in the polls, and many believed he would score an upset victory over the Liberals. [3] In the final days of the campaign, however, urban voters across Ontario shifted away from the Conservatives, thereby ensuring reelection of the Liberal government. In addition, only a few days prior to the vote, the Ottawa Sun published a damaging front-page story about Riddell, that was later retracted as inaccurate. Despite this erroneous news story, and the last minute shift in voter support, Riddell finished the election with more than 20,600 votes, the highest number ever recorded by a Conservative candidate in the riding's history, thereby finishing a relatively close second to McGuinty. [4]
After the election was over, the Ottawa Sun published a prominent retraction of its erroneous front-page story about Riddell and expressed regret at "the resulting prejudice to his campaign".
In May 2005, when it appeared that the Liberal government was about to be defeated and another election called, Riddell was recruited to run in Ottawa South a second time. In reaction to rumours that he had once worn a World War II German officer's costume to a campus costume party, as a teenage Halloween prank 28 years earlier, Conservative officials initially blocked Riddell's renomination as the Party's candidate. Riddell's disqualification caused a public outcry from Riddell's supporters across Ottawa, and was quickly assessed by the Conservative Party's National Arbitration Committee.
In August, 2005, the Conservative party arbitration committee overturned that decision after finding that Mr. Riddell had worn a Sgt. Shultz uniform from the TV show Hogan's Heroes as a prank 25 years ago, and should not be barred for a "youthful indiscretion". This was issued as a binding directive to Party officials, permitting him to be the party's candidate in Ottawa South a second time. [5]
Only three days prior to the 2006 election, which the Conservative Party hoped to win by focusing voter attention on the Liberal government's sponsorship scandal, Riddell stepped aside as the Party's candidate to enable Allan Cutler, the public servant who had blown the whistle on the scandal, to run in his stead in Ottawa South. Party officials issued a Press release thanking Riddell for his gesture and confirming that the Party "looked forward to having him run as its candidate in future elections". To compensate Riddell for relinquishing the nomination to Cutler, in a move designed to help them win the national campaign, they undertook to repay him his campaign expenses, pursuant to an agreement which Party Executive Director Michael Donison described in writing as legally "binding". Although Elections Canada later ruled the agreement to be legal, when news of the Party's agreement surfaced in the press, senior Party officials, including Party Leader Stephen Harper, publicly denied its existence.
After the Conservative victory in the election, Conservative Party officials refused to honour the agreement, and Riddell was eventually forced to apply to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice for a Court Order that it be implemented.
On January 11, 2007, after a two-day court hearing, Judge Denis Power of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued a decision confirming that the Party's agreement with Riddell was legally binding, and ordering it to immediately pay Riddell. The Judge ruled that when Riddell had stepped aside for Cutler, he had been "the preferred choice of the clear majority" and that "the evidence, taken as whole, clearly establishes that an agreement was reached". He concluded that "the crux of the agreement was that Mr. Riddell, the leading contender for the nomination, agreed to voluntarily step aside in favour of Allan Cutler in exchange for which he was to receive some financial compensation for expenses incurred by him in seeking the nomination". [6]
In a news article reporting on this Ontario Superior Court decision, Riddell was quoted as saying that he "remained a loyal Conservative" and that he intended to run again as a candidate for the Party some day.
In November 2007, Riddell, the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister quietly settled the case. The settlement was announced by a one-sentence joint news release by the Conservative Party and Alan Riddell, issued on an early Saturday morning: "The Conservative Party of Canada and Alan Riddell announce they have mutually settled all legal proceedings brought by Mr. Riddell against the Conservative Party of Canada and Conservative party officials." [7]
Robert Chiarelli is a Canadian politician. He was a Liberal member in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario who served from 1987 to 1997 and again from 2010 to 2018 who represented the ridings of Ottawa West and Ottawa West—Nepean. He was the Regional Chair of Ottawa-Carleton from 1997 to 2001 and was mayor of Ottawa from 2001 to 2006. He served in the provincial cabinets of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne. Chiarelli was a candidate for Mayor of Ottawa in the 2022 Ottawa municipal election.
Dalton James Patrick McGuinty Jr. is a former Canadian politician who served as the 24th premier of Ontario from 2003 to 2013. He was the first Liberal leader to win two majority governments since Mitchell Hepburn nearly 70 years earlier. In 2011, he became the first Liberal premier to secure a third consecutive term since Oliver Mowat after his party was re-elected in that year's provincial election.
The Ontario Liberal Party is a political party in the province of Ontario, Canada. The party has been led by Bonnie Crombie since December 2023.
The 2003 Ontario general election was held on October 2, 2003, to elect the 103 members of the 38th Legislative Assembly of the Province of Ontario, Canada.
Monia Mazigh is a Canadian author and academic best known for her efforts to free her husband Maher Arar from a Syrian prison. A resident of Ottawa, Ontario, she was the New Democratic Party candidate for the riding of Ottawa South, a traditionally Liberal riding, in the 2004 federal election. In June 2015 she was appointed National Coordinator of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.
John Russell Baird is a retired Canadian politician. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2015 in the cabinet of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He had been a member of the federal cabinet, in various positions, since 2006. Previously he was a provincial cabinet minister in Ontario during the governments of Premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves. Baird resigned from Harper's cabinet on February 3, 2015, and as a Member of Parliament on March 16, 2015.
Raymond Sung Joon Cho is a Canadian politician who has served as the Ontario minister of seniors and accessibility since June 29, 2018. A member of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party, Cho has sat as a member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) since 2016. He currently represents Scarborough North, and is the Legislative Assembly's oldest sitting MPP. Cho's over 30-year long political career began in 1991 when he was first elected to the Metro Toronto Council. Following amalgamation in 1998, Cho ran for Toronto City Council, where he re-elected eight times until resigning in 2016 following a successful run for Scarborough—Rouge River in a provincial by-election. Prior to entering politics, Cho worked as a social worker.
David Joseph McGuinty is a Canadian lawyer and politician who has served as the Member of Parliament for Ottawa South since 2004. He currently chairs the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, an executive agency allowing legislator oversight of the Canadian intelligence community. A member of the Liberal Party of Canada, he has been elected or reelected seven times, most recently in the 2021 federal elections.
The following is a timeline of the Canadian federal election, 2004. More on the election in general is available in the article 2004 Canadian federal election.
Ottawa South is a federal electoral district in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is represented in the House of Commons of Canada by David McGuinty, brother of former Premier of Ontario and Ottawa South MPP Dalton McGuinty. It has been held continuously by Liberal candidates since it was first contested in 1988, and is regarded as one of the strongest Liberal ridings in Canada. Ottawa South is a suburban, generally middle class riding, notable for having the highest Arab population in Ontario.
The 2007 Ontario general election was held on October 10, 2007, to elect members (MPPs) of the 39th Legislative Assembly of the Province of Ontario, Canada. The Liberals under Premier Dalton McGuinty won the election with a majority government, winning 71 out of a possible 107 seats with 42.2% of the popular vote. The election saw the third-lowest voter turnout in Ontario provincial elections, setting a then record for the lowest voter turnout with 52.8% of people who were eligible voted. This broke the previous record of 54.7% in the 1923 election, but would end up being surpassed in the 2011 and 2022 elections.
Richard Andrew Patten was a Canadian politician. Patten was a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1987 to 1990 and again from 1995 to 2007. He represented the riding of Ottawa Centre. He served as a cabinet minister in the government of David Peterson.
A referendum was held on October 10, 2007, on the question of whether to establish a mixed member proportional representation (MMP) system for elections to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. The vote was strongly in favour of the existing plurality voting or first-past-the-post (FPTP) system.
Twelve candidates of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada were elected in the 2000 federal election, making the party the fifth-largest in the House of Commons of Canada. Many of the party's candidates have their own biography pages; information about others may be found here.
The 1996 Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention, held between November 29 and December 1, 1996 at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, elected Dalton McGuinty as the new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, replacing Lyn McLeod, who announced her resignation following the 1995 Ontario provincial election.
The 2011 Ontario general election was held on October 6, 2011, to elect members of the 40th Legislative Assembly of Ontario. The Ontario Liberal Party was elected to a minority government, with the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario serving as the Official Opposition and the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) serving as the third party. In the final result, Premier McGuinty's party fell one seat short of winning a majority government.
Anything But Conservative was a strategic voting campaign trialled by opponents of the Conservative Party of Canada. It was also known as the ABC campaign, or Vote ABC.
The 1999 Ontario general election was held on June 3, 1999, to elect members of the 37th Legislative Assembly of the Canadian province Ontario.
Francis Drouin is a Canadian Liberal politician, who was elected to represent the riding of Glengarry—Prescott—Russell in the House of Commons of Canada in the 2015 federal election.
Darrel Brock Kent is a former Ottawa City Councillor. He served on council from 1980 to 1982 and from 1985 to 1991. He ran for mayor of Ottawa in 1982 and for Chair of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton in 1991.
Ottawa Citizen May 18, 2005 pg. A.12
suspended" Ottawa Citizen . June 21, 2004. pg. A.7
A.5