Alan Riddell is a bilingual labour relations lawyer and partner with the law firm of Soloway Wright LLP in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and France's Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris. While still a student, he worked for Progressive Conservative Party of Canada Senator and Foreign Affairs Critic Heath MacQuarrie, and later in the office of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. As a young lawyer he successfully argued a number of high-profile cases, including the landmark decision of Dagg v. Minister of Finance in the Supreme Court of Canada, which defined the privacy rights of federal public servants under Canada's new Access to Information Act. In 2004 federal election In March 2004, Riddell was approached by the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) to run as its candidate in the riding of Ottawa South, which was being vacated by Deputy Prime Minister, John Manley. He handily defeated others, including former Ottawa mayoralty candidate Terry Kilrea, for the 2004 CPC nomination. In the ensuing election, he ran against two nationally known names: David McGuinty, the younger brother of Ontario Liberal Party Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Monia Mazigh, of the New Democratic Party (NDP), best known as the wife of wrongfully imprisoned Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar. Although the riding was traditionally Liberal, it was thought that Riddell's background and dynamism, together with voter backlash against Liberal broken promises, gave him a good chance of winning. By the middle of the campaign, Riddell began to lead McGuinty and Mazigh in the polls, and many believed he would score an upset victory over the Liberals. In the final days of the campaign, however, urban voters across Ontario shifted away from the Conservatives, thereby ensuring reelection of the Liberal government. In addition, only a few days prior to the vote, the Ottawa Sun published a damaging front-page story about Riddell, that was later retracted as inaccurate. Despite this erroneous news story, and the last minute shift in voter support, Riddell finished the election with more than 20,600 votes, the highest number ever recorded by a Conservative candidate in the riding's history, thereby finishing a relatively close second to McGuinty. After the election was over, the Ottawa Sun published a prominent retraction of its erroneous front-page story about Riddell and expressed regret at "the resulting prejudice to his campaign". In 2006 federal election In May 2005, when it appeared that the Liberal