No newcomer seeking election to the legislature in years has attracted as much attention as a newspaper columnist who is running for the Progressive Conservatives in a Toronto by-election on September 17, but this is not the surest indication of merit.

Sue-Ann Levy, who covered city hall for the Toronto Sun for 11 years, is running in the midtown St. Paul's riding vacated by former Liberal cabinet minister Michael Bryant.

The Conservative party is so keen to have her that its president announced she is its candidate without waiting for a nomination meeting at which others could put their names forward.

The Sun, which has never been shy about promoting its own, said Premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals are "scared," because Levy is tireless, afraid of no one and fights for the underdog.

The Toronto Star, which supports the Liberals, said Levy is scrappy and hard-hitting and the Liberals fear that she is "a dream candidate" who could win and hurt their image.

A different picture of Levy emerges from her columns. Her reach has extended as far as provincial politics. She has called McGuinty "car-hating," because he wants to extend public transit, and said he and Toronto Mayor David Miller are "cozy as two pigs in poop" on this issue, on which many will support the premier and mayor.

Levy criticized McGuinty for giving Toronto power to levy new taxes and Miller for using it, although it has long been recognized that the city lacked revenue sources, that reliance on property taxes provides inequities and that a level of government that spends money should take responsibility for raising it.

Levy is not always a fighter for those without power, because she has scoffed that agencies which go out on frigid nights and distribute blankets, food and a few words of comfort to people living on the streets, merely want to be trendy and "give the hardcore homeless the tools to stay on the streets."

This sounds like the former far-right Conservative premier, Mike Harris, who said in the 1990s that many live on the streets because they choose to, ignoring the many factors that put and keep people out of their homes.

Harris's views, which offended many, are now back in style under the Conservatives' new leader, Tim Hudak, and Levy will feel comfortable among them.

But she is best known for attacking, relentlessly and unceasingly, Toronto's mayor, who no doubt deserves some of it.

Miller, a Harvard graduate, brought an intelligence to the job that was lacking in previous years, and earlier ran unsuccessfully for the New Democrats.

Levy's columns have lashed at Miller day after day, particularly on the theme that he spends too much, and they lack understanding that demands for, and costs of, city services are increasing.

Her columns are short on reasoned, constructive criticism and long on name-calling and mainly a stream of epithets directed at Miller and those around him.

She has railed at Socialist Silly Hall, His Blondness, His Blond Locks, King David and his loyal henchmen, David and his lapdogs, the spendaholic mayor, the socialist mayor and his minions, the socialists and their feckless leader, and the childish brats in Miller's regime who refuse to get their house in order. Any humour in these wears off long before you read them for the 100th time.

Levy constantly quotes Miller's opponents at city hall, lobbies representing business and the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation. You would have to search hard to find any that criticize business.

She almost never finds anyone who has a good word to say about the mayor, although such people should not be hard to find.

Since Miller has won two elections comfortably, there must be reasons people support him, but if there are, Levy has never told them to her readers.

Smart voters eventually will see that someone who tells only one side of a story as too biased to be believed, and the Liberals could win the byelection if they could get enough people to read the Tory candidate's back columns.