Some pundits -- including Bob Rae -- are suggesting that Andrew Scheer's decision to keep Doug Ford under wraps during the election was a mistake. Bob Hepburn writes:
In Scheer’s case, he appears delusional about how he fared in Ontario, telling reporters on Tuesday that “we made significant gains throughout the GTA and throughout Ontario.”
In fact, the Tories didn’t win a single seat in Toronto, failed to increase their seat total in the 905 area, saw the Liberals’ seat total in Ontario drop by just one to 79, and witnessed the percentage of votes the Tories won slip to 33.2 per cent from 35 per cent in the 2015 election.
How can Scheer believe all that negative news constitutes “significant gains?”
In reality, the Conservatives lost the election because they failed to increase their number of seats in vote-rich urban areas of Ontario, the key battleground where the progressive voters that Scheer needed to attract were fed up with Ford. Ontario was the only English Canada province where the Tories’ vote percentage actually dropped.
The simple fact is that many Ontarians didn't vote for Scheer because Doug Ford had persuaded them not to:
Polls clearly showed most Ontario voters took Ford into consideration when deciding which party to support. An exit poll conducted for Global News indicated more than half those polled said Ford “had at least some impact on their vote.”
Also, Vote Compass, a civic engagement app distributed through the CBC, showed 51 per cent of some 24,000 who took part said they were much less likely to vote for Scheer because of Ford’s policies.
In addition, Conservative candidates knocking on doors across the province spoke candidly about encountering countless voters with a visceral hate for Ford, who told them that because of Ford there was no way they would vote Tory.
Scheer hurt his own cause by running a campaign dramatically out of touch with where most Ontario residents are these days, especially on issues such as climate change. But he would have hurt it much worse if he had bowed to siren calls to set Ford free.
There's a clear message in Scheer's failure to win power. It's a mistake to take the road Doug Ford has taken.
Image: SlidePlayer
4 comments:
I don't think Ford was much of a factor in Ontario either way. For every voter who was turned off by Ford's policies there was another who was insulted that he was kept locked up while Kenny toured the province instead.
The Cons bet that Harper's personal unpopularity was what cost them the 2015 election. They figured their approach was sound, they just needed another salesman. They were wrong.
A party can't win in Ontario and Quebec without at least paying lip-service to environmental issues. Ford got elected in 2018 because of the collapse in OLP support, not because of his anti-environmentalism. Scheer wrongly calculated that the climate denial that got the Prairie hicks doubling down on their votes for him would work east of Manitoba. But the Cons were going to sweep the Prairies no matter what they did. They would have been better off with a serious carbon plan that cost them a few votes in the West but allowed them to grab seats in the East.
Cap
I agree that Scheer lost because he misread the Ontario electorate, Cap. However, in our riding, if you add the votes of the People's Party candidate to the votes for the Conservative candidate, the margin between the winning Liberal and the defeated Conservative is very slim. I suspect that Bernier's Party stole votes from several Conservative candidates.
That's interesting, Owen. Conventional wisdom was that PP vote-splitting didn't really cost the Cons. In my riding, the PP candidate's 1% of the vote wouldn't have done much to make up the 15 point spread between the Cons and the winning Libs.
Cap
Max was far behind in your riding, Cap. But my riding has quite a few blue libertarians.
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