Conservative candidate Damian Konstantinakos said he isn’t fazed that Ottawa Centre residents have traditionally voted for more left-wing parties.
Konstantinakos said he doesn’t like discussing polls. Canadians should pay less attention to projected results, and go affect the actual outcome themselves, the 41-year-old Ottawa native said.
“The result that most voters should be concerned about is that 30,000 voters stayed home in the last election,” he said. “This notion that the election is already settled, it convinces people who feel that they’ll be on the losing side to stay home.”
He will be running for the second time. In 2011, he came in second behind New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate Paul Dewar.
Konstantinakos was only four years old the last time a Conservative candidate was elected in Ottawa Centre.
He said he believes the student vote could go to his party this election.
“If you like what’s going on in the country, you aren’t going to scream and yell about it,” Konstantinakos said. When hundreds of thousands of high school students across Canada casted mock ballots in the Student Vote project in 2011, a plurality voted for the Conservatives.
Konstantinakos said the last nine years of Conservative federal rule will help convince Canadians that “staying the course” is the way to go. Youth employment is a focus of his party, he said.
He thinks his party’s platform can propel him to victory.
“I constantly hear about jobs at the door,” he said. “We’re the only party convinced that small business and private sector grow in Ottawa Centre.”
“I want to make it easier on an employer to hire that next young person,” Konstantinakos said. In response to the Liberal’s $1.5 billion spending promise for young people, he said the Liberal Party has to borrow money from Canadians to fund it.
“They’ll say ‘yeah, we created a few jobs,’ but they won’t talk about the other ones we’ve lost because of it,” Konstantinakos said.
Konstantinakos said the most concerning issue to people in Ottawa Centre is the Canadian economy.
“A lot of people are very concerned about debt levels and deficit levels,” he said.
“There are a lot of people worried. If you’re a young family, is there money for the education and health care system? If you’re a single person looking for work, is my job going to be there?”
On the Anti-Terrorism Act, the controversial security law commonly known as Bill C-51, Konstantinakos said he thinks the Liberal’s position on the law is odd and confusing.
“If they say we’re playing the politics of fear, I want to ask why they voted for it,” he said. “You can’t be talking out of two sides of your mouth at the same time, which is exactly what the Liberal Party did.”
Konstantinakos said the NDP inaccurately believe Bill C-51 is turning Canada into a police state.
“If you look at England and Germany, who have these measures in place, I don’t think you can call them a police state by any delusion,” he said. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair denied ever using the term “police state” in a recent debate.
“I look at the measures of this bill—I want police officers to talk to one another and to work together,” Konstantinakos said. “If CSIS determines that a young person is going to travel to Syria, they should be forced to inform the parents of that child. That’s exactly what C-51 does.”
He said any enforcement of the law needs to be approved by the courts.
“I don’t want these issues politicized in the hands of MPs, but in the hands of judges,” he said.
Konstantinakos was born and raised in Ottawa, and is a resident of the Glebe. He has been an engineer and business manager in the technology sector for the last 18 years. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Queen’s University and received his Master’s of Business Administration from the same school.
“I want the people of this riding to be fought over,” he said, “and that’s exactly the message that is resonating.”
