The Old Paradigm

In Ontario, the conventional wisdom dictates that elections are won in the middle. That wisdom goes all the way back to the 1940's, when the Progressive Conservatives won 12 consecutive elections. Steve Paikin writes:

In 1943, the Tories had a 49-year-old war veteran named George Drew (born 124 years ago today) as their leader. He was the first politician to speak of a “Big Blue Machine,” one that would fan out across the province, capturing constituency after constituency. And for the next 42 years, that’s pretty much what happened. The Tories occupied the broad middle of the political spectrum. To their left was the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation — the party that in the early 1960s would morph into the NDP. The Liberals were, despite their name, a more rural, conservative party.

As long as the Tories could hang on to the middle, thereby splitting the votes of their critics between the other two parties, they could continue to win elections. And that’s what they did, on 12 consecutive occasions between 1943 and 1985.

When the Tories moved right and aped Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, David Peterson -- with the help of Bob Rae -- moved into the middle. Mike Harris campaigned like a centrist and replaced Peterson. But his policies moved Ontario starkly to the right. Then Dalton McGuinty moved into the middle and replaced Harris.

But these days, the middle seems to have disappeared:

One of the things that makes this 2018 election campaign so interesting is that none of the major political parties today seems at all interested in seizing the middle. Both the Liberals and the New Democrats are vying to be the more left-wing party, each trying to offer a more interventionist platform than the other. And curiously, the PCs under Doug Ford seem content to define their conservatism in more right-wing, populist terms — consistent with the new leader’s “Ford Nation” branding.

Ironically, this opens up a large gap in the middle where pollsters tell us elections are usually won. Former PC leader Patrick Brown understood this: he tried to coax his fellow Tories away from the fringes and more toward the centre of the political spectrum. He was mostly successful at doing so, although the hold-outs (social conservatives, anti-carbon-tax types, etc.) certainly made lots of noise.

Andrea Horwath also understood that in 2014, when she tried to move her party toward the middle by offering tax cuts to small businesses and promising to find $600 million in spending cuts — two very un-NDP-like planks in the platform. Her problem was, she couldn’t bring her troops along with her. Too many NDP grassroots members don’t care about winning but about staying true to their socialist principles. That’s perfectly fine, except that the disconnect was apparent for all to see — and it hurt Horwath’s chances of winning.

In fairness, Ford is in some senses trying to have it both ways. He wants to stay true to his populist, right-wing roots, while at the same time flirting with more moderate Ontarians. That’s surely why he backtracked on his pledge to allow development in the Greenbelt and has tried to assure people that if he wins, there will be no massive downsizing of the public sector — something that former PC leader Tim Hudak pledged to do during the 2014 campaign.

Nevertheless, Ford’s core message of tax cuts, taking a step back on fighting climate change, and finding billions of dollars in so-called efficiencies has left many in the centre at best suspicious and at worst alarmed.

To be sure, some will vote for the Green Party, which has tried to advance some centrist policies — but the Greens have neither the money nor the megaphone to cut through. 

So where does that leave us? In uncharted territory. The old paradigm seems to be broken.

Image: TVO