All eyes on Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection as summer parliamentary hiatus begins

With both the House and Senate officially on hiatus until September, the must-watch political drama of the week is unfolding in a downtown Toronto riding that, right up until a few months ago, was widely considered to be one of the most rock-solid Liberal seats in Canada but is now being framed as a mission-critical, make-or-break test — not just for the party, which has been trailing the Conservatives by double digits for months, at least as far as topline support, but for the prime minister as well.

After weeks of increasingly frenzied speculation that Team Trudeau may be poised to lose Toronto-St. Paul’s to the Conservatives for the first time in nearly three decades, voters are finally set to fill the vacancy created by the departure of longtime Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett earlier this year.

Hoping to keep the seat in the red column: Former Liberal staffer Leslie Church, who, as iPolitics reported in May, “resigned as chief of staff (to) Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in October to seek the nomination,” which she ultimately secured after a two-way race against Global Affairs Canada senior bureaucrat Emma Richardson.