Something's Out Of Joint

Ontarians have given Doug Ford four more years. He and his party won 83 seats in the province's 124-seat legislature. I'm not surprised. The polls predicted this outcome at the beginning of the campaign.

But I am disappointed. The Dippers and the Liberals received roughly the same proportions of the popular vote. In fact, the Liberals did a tad better than the Dippers -- 23.9% to 23.7%. But the Dippers captured 31 seats, while the Liberals won 8 -- once again, not enough for official party status.

Voter turnout was 46%

Something's out of joint.

Image: The Toronto Star

An Ill Wind

The American disease has crossed the border. It's showing up in Ontario's election. Haydn Watters writes:

Marjorie Knight used to knock on doors alone. This Ontario election, her campaign team has decided to always have her canvassing with someone else.

"I had people call the police on me because I was 'casing' homes as I was going door to door knocking," said the Cambridge NDP candidate. "You go up to somebody and they slam the door in your face and tell you that they don't deal with your kind. Not sure what kind that is."

Knight, who first ran in 2018, doesn't want to put herself at risk — she doesn't know who she may bump into while campaigning. One of her election signs was recently defaced with slurs.

"It was definitely hateful. And sadly, it's within my community," she said.

Scarborough—Guildwood Liberal candidate Mitzie Hunter has had her campaign signs vandalized too, with hateful words like Nazi and fascist. In Peterborough, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was accosted by protesters at a rally for a provincial NDP candidate. Protesters hurled vile insults and threats at him, and gave him the middle finger. (Peterborough police investigated and say there's no grounds for criminal charges.)

Krystal Brooks, Green Party candidate for Simcoe North, felt upset and hurt after finding one of her signs defaced with personal attacks. Brooks is from Rama First Nation and is a human trafficking survivor.

"On the one side, it said, 'Go back to the reserve,'" she said. "On the other side, it was a little too inappropriate to even say. But it was fairly targeted at my human trafficking background."

The OPP has been tracking this kind of behaviour:

Bill Dickson, OPP spokesperson, is noticing a shift in tone this election campaign.

"Things have changed. The climate has changed. People seem to have changed and some have blamed it on COVID," he said. "If you don't agree with a candidate, that's fine. But to target them with words that are hateful? It's just wrong."

Dickson notes that between 2020 and 2021, the OPP saw a 14 per cent increase in "threatening and inappropriate communications toward government officials." This anger and polarization was well displayed during last fall's federal election. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even had gravel thrown at him during a campaign stop in London, Ont.

It's an ill wind that blows from the south.

Image: CBC News

COVID? What's That?

In Ontario, COVID  cases are sprouting like dandelions in the spring. Two of the party leaders are self-isolating. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

The Green Party’s Mike Schreiner disclosed his positive result just two days after sharing the stage with his counterparts in Monday’s televised debate. Horwath tweeted out her sympathies and good wishes to Schreiner, but by the next morning similar sympathy tweets were coming her way.

What’s notable is how little notice they both attracted. Fleeting stories and ephemeral headlines, to be sure, but their campaigns went on because the show goes on (as with other politicians across Canada and around the world who caught COVID before them — premiers and PMs, presidents and the Queen).

Holed up in her airport hotel room, sinuses stuffed up, Horwath assured supporters and reporters at her next scheduled event that the party had contingency plans for precisely such an eventuality. Beamed in via Zoom, the NDP leader appeared at a Sault Ste. Marie photo-op promising she was still a contender, thanks to vaccines and Tylenol.

The Greens’ Schreiner, too, has kept up his hectic schedule — off the campaign trail but online. No more staged arrivals in electric vehicles painted green in the party’s official colour scheme.

The takeaway message — despite the political script blaming Ford’s Progressive Conservatives for COVID claiming so many lives — is that life goes on. Schreiner was essentially asymptomatic, while Horwath had nagging throat and headache symptoms.

They talked about how other Ontarians had been far less lucky in their pandemic afflictions, and deserving of paid sick days. But the two leaders stayed on the job — living proof of living with COVID, and that democracy must also live on.

Meanwhile, as Monkeypox spreads, public health officials have suggested that we follow the same portocols that we have used for COVID. But fewer and fewer of us are following them. We have succumbed to that other monkey virus.

Image: Dreamstime.com

Faux Populist

In his first quest for the brass ring, Doug Ford ran as an unapologetic populist. Robin Sears writes:

Like Donald Trump, Ford’s deepest angst is being viewed by his hated “elites” as not very smart and somewhat vulgar socially. It’s what lies behind the bluster of every bellowing, red-faced populist. What was his campaign team thinking when they publicly signalled he is not the sharpest blade in the drawer?

Many populists with more blarney than brains have been great political successes — Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, Bill Vander Zalm — so this is not a fatal weakness. It does often lead, however, to your campaign team being too desperate to shield your less-than-persuasive knowledge of issues from careful examination.

And that weakness was apparent last week, at the first leaders' debate, when Ford showed up with notes from which he read -- a clear indication that Ford is not who he would like to appear to be. And there's more evidence of that. Ford wants to build a new highway near the GTA:

For GTA voters, though, perhaps the most insulting promise is his brag he intends to waste billions on a pointless new superhighway to be punched through farmland at the very edge of Ontario’s priceless agricultural jewel, the Holland Marsh. This is very much off-brand for the New Ford, and is a return to the Old Ford’s rants about “war-on-the-car” elites.

His talking points claimed it will cost only $10 billion dollars, and will save commuters hours of struggle in traffic. Those not trapped in a 1960s vision of the future — that is too say almost every urban planner, transit and traffic expert in the province — say it is likely to cost a great deal more and save only seconds of travel time. One wonders how many affordable houses those billions might build.

When Conservatives are financially dependent on rich corporate backers — that certainly defines this gang — and they brag about a clearly absurd policy, follow the money. The land this superhighway will plow through is owned by several of Toronto’s richest development families. It will see their adjacent land values soar. As Malvina Reynolds once sang, they will seed that farmland with hundreds of “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky.”

The Globe revealed that many of the executives of these family empires are among Doug Ford’s biggest contributors. Surely, Ontario deserves a less craven government — one not trapped in visions of the past. One led by a premier who doesn’t need cheat sheets.

The unapologetic populist has always been a faux populist.

Image: CBC

It's Called Stupidity

The Ontario Party is the new kid on the block. Kelsey Carolan reports in The Hill that:

The party was founded in May 2018, according to its website, but didn’t have a leader until December 2021, when Derek Sloan, a former conservative member of parliament, took control.

“In the fall of 2021, with the launch of vaccine passports, citizens who requested that their right to freedom of conscience, informed consent, medical privacy, and bodily autonomy be respected, had their request overruled,” the party mission outlines. “In the absence of sufficient cause, they were banned from public life, fired from their jobs, or removed from their college or university programs.”

Sloan spoke during the Freedom Convoy, advertising the party as an alternative to the Conservative Party, which he said has moved “so far to the left.”

And now the party has announced that it has hired Roger Stone as an advisor:

“I can’t wait to see the amazing effect that Roger’s genius will have on our campaign to take back Ontario,” Sloan said in a statement.

Stone commended Canadians who protested COVID-19 mandates and restrictions throughout the three-week “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa, which ended in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoking emergency powers to quell the disruption. According to the statement, the protest inspired Stone to join forces with the party.

“They [protestors] came there for a purpose and when you’re protesting you may not get everything you want but you’re expecting to at least have the government listen to what you talk about,” Stone said on the “The Stew Peters Show.” “The government has done nothing but show contempt toward these people.”

There is a virus more deadly than COVID. It's called stupidity.

Image: Vanity Fair

The Upcoming Election

There are a little more than five weeks to go until Ontario's election. And, if you believe the polls, Doug Ford might just win it. Bob Hepburn writes:

Ford’s laughing because his Progressive Conservatives appear headed for a second straight majority victory — and the NDP and Liberals seem incapable of stopping them.

With the June 2 election less than 50 days away, latest polls indicate the PCs are backed by 38 per cent of decided voters, the NDP and Liberals by 25 to 27 per cent, and the Greens 5 per cent.

Indeed, vote splitting between the NDP, Liberals and Greens could result in progressive voters, who comprise more than 60 per cent of the electorate, seeing their worst nightmare come true — a second Ford victory in which his Tories match or exceed the 76 seats they won in 2018. A total of 63 seats are needed to form a majority government.

That’s why a growing number of progressive voters are urging strategic voting. They believe such a strategy solves the problem of vote splitting by voting for one candidate in each riding to allow the progressive majority to win the seat.

Importantly, they also believe — or fear — that it may be the only way to defeat Ford, or at least limit him to a minority.

There's no talk of a deal between the NDP and the Liberals:

Both NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca say they aren’t at all interested in working together in individual ridings to defeat Ford. “You aren’t going to hear me talk about strategic voting,” Del Duca told reporters last week.

While rejecting any deal with the Liberals, Horwath is urging voters to vote strategically for the NDP. “I’m asking folks who may have decided in the past to vote Liberal to keep Conservatives out to recognize that this time that’s not the strategy,” she said last week. “This time, that strategy will split the vote and cause Doug Ford to come up the middle.”

Meanwhile, Ford keeps announcing billions of dollars in giveaways. Clearly, he believes he can buy his way into a second term.

As in the last two federal elections, progressive voters will have to vote strategically -- and force the Liberals and the Dippers to work together.

Image: thestar.com