Kanata-Carleton Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon welcomed Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie to her riding on Wednesday and said she’s ready to “power through” to re-election.
Crombie joined McCrimmon at TutorOcean, a global tutoring marketplace based in Kanata, during a day of public events in Ottawa, and McCrimmon said Crombie is a “big believer” in the growth that Kanata has seen in recent years.
“When I toured [Crombie] around Kanata for the first time, she said, ‘How did you guys make all this happen? This is what we need for the rest of Ontario’,” McCrimmon told Ottawa Compass. “She’s a big believer in what we’ve managed.”
Kanata-Carleton is one of the few suburban ridings in Ottawa that is held by the Liberals. McCrimmon was elected in 2023 in a by-election following a 31-year military career and two consecutive terms as the Member of Parliament for Kanata-Carleton in the House of Commons. She also made an unsuccessful bid for the Liberal leadership in 2013.
She was elected before Crombie became the face of the party, but she said she’s confident her voters want Crombie as their premier.
“The message that I’m getting at the doors is they don’t trust Doug Ford to do this,” she said, citing Premier Doug Ford’s handling of economic threats from U.S. President Donald Trump.
“[Ford] just made us look weak and scared, and not unified — and that’s what we need to be to take on Trump: unified.”
McCrimmon said she’s also leaning on her reputation in the riding and is confident about her re-election.
“Who calls an election in the middle of February, right?… But we said, ‘to heck with it’, we’re still going to go out and knock on doors, so we’re going to put up signs, and we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that people know that we’re in it for them,” she said. “I think people have known me for a long time, so they know what they’re getting right.”
Crombie’s Kanata visit followed a stop in the east end where she announced plans for income tax cuts and health care investments. She also reiterated promises to improve transit in Ottawa, including uploading the LRT to the province, extending light rail to Kanata and Barrhaven, and creating a bus lane and a high occupancy lane to Rockland.
“It’s a step in the right direction to reducing congestion because God knows I personally have spent half my life on that road,” said Trevor Stewart, the Liberal candidate for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell. “We absolutely need to reduce that congestion, and we’ve made that commitment to do just that.”
Crombie added that she would consider uploading and expanding other roadways that are particularly congested.
