Ottawa

Anybody’s guess

Greg Fingas considers what we now know of the NDP leadership race.

Of course, the stories have focused on the candidates’ relative positioning – with Paul Dewar’s camp making a particularly concerted effort to suggest that Brian Topp ranks below Dewar. But the two full poll results released yesterday show remarkably little gap between the second- and fifth-place candidates: both suggest that the fifth-place candidate could vault all the way to second by winning over, say, Niki Ashton’s supporters, while the 31% undecided number in Dewar’s poll signals that there’s plenty of room for small shifts with a massive potential impact on the candidates’ rankings.

And what’s more, both polls also suggest that an alliance among any three of Nash, Dewar, Topp, Cullen and their supporters would result in the beneficiary being on at least even terms with Mulcair for the final ballot.

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