ANALYSIS: Can Rob Cerjanec defy the odds again?

Rob Cerjanec has been written off before, told that he doesn’t have a prayer of being in the winner’s circle. He heard it exactly a year ago when he was a last-minute Liberal candidate in Ajax, going against a seemingly unbeatable Progressive Conservative MPP in Patrice Barnes, who was also deputy speaker of the legislature.

At the time, Cerjanec was running his friend Qadira Jackson’s campaign in Scarborough Southwest. He had his own business as a communications consultant and was doing some work for the region’s public-school board. But the Liberals needed a candidate in Ajax. Cerjanec, now 37, thought he knew the people and issues well, and had always wanted to run for office at some point, so the Liberals shoehorned him into the nomination just a month before the February 27, 2025, election.

One of the first things he did was call Barnes to let her know he was in the race. “I was wondering who it was going to be!” she responded.

But Cerjanec didn’t join the campaign just to give the Grits a name on a ballot. All Liberal candidates have a canvassing app on their smartphones, which records all kinds of campaign data. Cerjanec’s team was in the top 10 of Ontario’s 124 ridings in terms of the number of doors knocked on. He was getting out there.

That’s a particularly heavy lift in Ajax, where 85 per cent of residents are homeowners. There aren’t too many […] This is an excerpt. Read the full article at TVO.org.