Liberal candidate avoids mentioning party
Markham-Unionville contender avoids logo in campaign signs
Don’t expect to find out Markham-Unionville candidate Amanda Yeung Collucci is running for the Liberals based on her election signs.
They don’t mention her party affiliation anywhere.
Collucci, who is currently Ward 6 councillor in Markham, has made the choice not to highlight her party affiliation on her election signs.
The signs say: “Elect Amanda Yeung Collucci: Our Home. Our Future.”
It’s the same slogan Collucci used in her municipal campaign when she was elected to Markham council in 2014. Asked if she was trying to hide the fact she was running for the Liberals, currently running third in polls behind the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats, Collucci said, “Of course not.”
“I don’t think I need the Liberal logo or the Liberal word to tell people I’m a Liberal,” Collucci said in an interview on Tuesday.
“The colour red says it all,” she added. Collucci said she has a sign strategy, though she didn’t go into detail about what that would involve.
“My signs are going to come out in different stages. I’m not going to put all of my signs out at once. There will be staging,” she said.
University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman says what Collucci is doing is not unprecedented.
“This is not unusual,” Wiseman said, speculating that she perceives that she is more popular than the Liberals.
“Because so many people vote on the basis of party and not on the basis of individual candidate, she wants to stress individual candidate, which in some cases does have an impact,” he said.
Collucci said she wanted to talk about the issues separating her party from the PCs and NDP. And she said she wasn’t alone in not displaying her party logo. “In fact, Doug Ford never had a PC logo in any of his press conferences and he only stood in front of an Ontario flag. Does it mean that he’s not a PC?” she questioned.