Presidential candidates may come and go from Maine, but there is one debate that is likely to persist here long after the election is over and the campaign signs are uprooted and hauled away:

Are there mountain lions in Maine?

We get frequent reports (well, John Holyoke does, anyway) about mountain lion or cougar sightings in our state, and always they seem to be met with doubt or outright debunking. Waldoboro, Corea, and Ellsworth are some of the places where claims of wild cat wanderings, sometimes accompanied by dubious photographic evidence, have cropped up in recent years.

Now, it seems, there is some fairly compelling (but unconfirmed) video evidence of a cougar sighting near the Maine-New Brunswick border — only it’s on the other side of the border. According to this CBC report, Michele McLaughlin, a resident of Grand Falls, N.B., used her cellphone on Oct. 5 to record the feline walking through a field by her home.

Here’s the video CBC posted on its site:

And here is the same video (less zoomed in) that McLaughlin posted on her Facebook page:

I’m not a wildlife expert, but it sure does look like a mountain lion or something similar to me. And, based on where McLaughlin says she shot the video, the animal was only two miles from Maine.