ANALYSIS: In Northern Ontario, peril for Liberals, opportunity for Conservatives, NDP

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre opens a week of campaigning for votes in Northern Ontario on Monday with a rally in Fort Frances, Ont., in the riding of Thunder Bay—Rainy River, a region that a small-c conservative candidate has not won since 1930.

The incumbent MP for the riding, a Liberal and former emergency room physician Marcus Powlowski, is not surprised at Poilievre’s chutzpah, looking for enough votes in a riding to do what no leader of a conservative party has done in 90 years — namely, win over the voters in this vast riding, which includes the Fort William part of Thunder Bay, Atikokan, Rainy River, and Fort Frances.

“This may be news to you,” Powlowski said with a wry smile during a recent interview, “but the Liberals aren’t exactly riding the crest of popularity at the moment. So I think he thinks everything’s possible.”

Indeed. A Global News analysis of the current state of federal polling trends in Ontario shows that there is a distinct possibility that the Liberals, who currently hold six of northern Ontario’s 10 seats, might be shut out, something that hasn’t happened since the 2011 general election which, coincidentally, was the last time — and the only time — the modern Conservative Party of Canada won a national majority government.

Both Conservatives and New Democrats believe there is an opportunity to pick up seats in the region at the expense of the Liberals.

But in addition to polling headwinds, most incumbent Liberals must also deal with a radically changed electoral map. Instead of 10 ridings for a region that stretches from Muskoka’s cottage country in the south to the Manitoba border in the northwest, there will be just nine.

Terry Sheehan, the incumbent Liberal for the current riding of Sault