When I decided to run as Liberal candidate in Dufferin- Caledon for the Oct. 10 provincial election, one of the things I most looked forward to was the coming joust with Thomas Claridge, the editor and main editorial writer of the Orangeville Citizen.

As a lifelong resident of the riding, I rarely agreed with his old-fashioned, right-wing ideas, but I had grown to admire his penetrating style and ability to marshal his facts.

So you can imagine my disappointment to discover, in the May 24 edition of the Citizen, that Mr. Claridge had turned over the first editorial on the election to someone without that famous Claridge know-how.

Although the editorial is unsigned, surely this cannot be his work.

As a former member of the Ontario Press Council, he would, for example, never have described me as "a sacrificial lamb" without ever even having talked with me - at least I hope not in a matter as serious as a campaign to decide who will represent this riding at Queen's Park for the next four years.

If he had checked the facts, the writer would have discovered I recently served as senior policy adviser for Attorney General Michael Bryant on a wide range of issues, including family and criminal law.

Earlier, I served as a senior adviser for the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. That doesn't sound much like a person the Liberal party would throw to the wolves, does it?

I wasn't being downgraded as a lamb, one would hope, merely because I am a product of the local Upper Grand and Dufferin- Peel school systems.

None of the teachers I had here, including your contributing editor, William Bothwell, ever told me that I should settle for second best. It was the solid background they instilled that allowed me to become a gold medal winner in history and political science at the University of Ottawa and an award-winning graduate of the University of Toronto law school.

When you have lawyers such as Eddie Greenspan among your teachers, as I did, you are more likely to be a lion than a lamb, let alone a sacrificial one.

I was courted by, and worked for, the most prestigious Bay Street law firms before coming back to practice law in the only place I have ever considered home.

Another major miscue in the editorial saw the writer raising the notorious Highway 10 bottleneck at Caledon village as a matter that will hurt my campaign. Surely, this is not a subject any politically wise Conservative would have dared to raise.

For the better part of 40 years, a series of Tory governments refused to lift even a shovel to alleviate this major source of frustration for local commuters. Then, this spring, the Liberal government announced it would fix the problem and has already taken concrete steps to do so, as was outlined in the front-page story in the Caledon Enterprise on May 19.

Construction on the two-phase project will start in September and four lanes through Caledon Village are expected to be open to traffic in 2008.

An experienced editor such as Mr. Claridge would never have raised the issue of upgrading provincial office space without even a mention of the extensive renovations to the Dufferin County courthouse that were needed for over a decade and finally delivered by the McGuinty Liberals.

The editorial writer does point out that ineffective Tory representation has allowed the problems to persist. But calling for a "coronation" to continue such poor representation is logic as convoluted as the map of Ontario highways left to us by Tory downloading.

It is clear that only a Liberal government has the political will to clear up the Tory mess and a local Liberal representative at the government table is what is required to ensure the job is done properly.

Betsy Hall, Liberal candidate for

Dufferin-Caledon