Did you notice who Jeff Leiper didn't thank? | Opinion

Mayoral candidate Jeff Leiper delivers remarks during municipal election night on Monday. Photo by Spencer Colby /POSTMEDIA

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If you watched Jeff Leiper’s concession speech on Monday night following his failed bid to become mayor, you may have noticed something passing strange. And no, I don’t mean the fact that he was wearing a suit and tie or that he quoted Lady Macbeth, although both did seem madly out of place.

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I’m talking about Leiper’s failure to mention third-place finisher Neil Saravanamuttoo.

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The omission might not have been so glaring had Leiper not first gone out of his way to thank Alex Lawson, who finished fourth and pitches his political tent a considerable distance from Leiper’s.

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“To Alex Lawson,” Leiper said, “thank you for bringing your ideas, your energy and your commitment to Ottawa in this race. We often agreed on the challenges that the city is facing while we were proposing very different solutions.”

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And then he moved on to thanking the re-elected Mark Sutcliffe for his service to the city, etc., etc.

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But not a peep about Saravanamuttoo. In the parlance of a bygone century, Jeff gave Neil the high hat. The brush-off.

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An oversight? Unlikely. The speech, after all, was scripted.

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So it’s hard not to wonder whether the snub had anything to do with the suggestion often floated throughout the campaign that Saravanamuttoo should have dropped out to avoid splitting the “progressive” vote.

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And the numbers are tantalizing.

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Deceptively so.

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According to unofficial election results, Sutcliffe received 139,354 votes, compared with Leiper’s 105,819 and Saravanamuttoo’s 34,463.

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If you combine Leiper’s and Saravanamuttoo’s, you get 140,282 — 928 more than Sutcliffe.

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But the argument is nonsense. Not everyone who voted for Saravanamuttoo would otherwise have voted for Leiper. Some would have voted for Sutcliffe, some for Lawson, and some for someone else. Others might have stayed home to watch the Leafs lose.

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I suspect many people who voted for Saravanamuttoo did so because they didn’t particularly want Sutcliffe or Leiper as mayor.

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It wouldn’t be an unreasonable position. Both men had spent the last four years at city hall — Leiper for the previous eight as well — and voters who were unhappy with Ottawa’s transit system, finances, housing crisis or any of its other challenges might have decided that neither deserved a promotion or an additional term.

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Saravanamuttoo and Lawson, meanwhile, were outsiders. Neither was saddled with having to explain or defend previous council decisions, giving voters dissatisfied with the status quo a reason to listen to their ideas.

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Isn’t that what elections are supposed to be about — people sharing ideas about the kind of city they want? I find the notion that Saravanamuttoo should have withdrawn from the race disturbingly undemocratic.