As you seem to really want one, here’s your warning for personal insults and acting like a jerk. Do not do this again.
RickJay
Moderator
Tim Hudak shot himself in the foot repeatedly during the campaign and the NDP probably doesn’t have enough support to win in most ridings. Who does that leave? The Freedom Party?
The Toronto media shot Tim Hudak in the foot repeatedly. The Freedom Party sounds like a bunch of Libertarian nutjobs, frankly.
Like when they (the Toronto Sun and the Globe and Mail) officially endorsed his party? I understand you’re disappointed, but don’t blame the ‘liberal media’ for the result.
Hudak ran a very right-wing campaign, openly calling for large cuts to government, the lowest corporate taxes in North America, and cuts to services. The result? Only the rural, southern ridings stuck with him, and his party’s vote share fell by 5%. The left-leaning parties both saw increased vote share and seat counts. It seems to me that veering right didn’t take him down a road the population wanted to follow (conservative base aside), and that was his doing, not the media’s.
The Toronto media did nothing to Hudak or at least nothing more than what the media do to any other leader. Andrea Howath received next to no support, the media did nothing but talk about gas plants, ornge, hard drives, sorry sorry sorry and everything else. Oh and they focused on 100,000 jobs eliminated. So why did that freak out everyone?
They freaked because 1,000,000 jobs in the future are all hypothetical, but 100,000 jobs eliminated are 100,000 jobs people have right now.
Hudak, and the PCs, opted for the whole stern medicine approach and utterly failed to reassure Ontario voters that a PC victory wouldn’t hurt them more than dealing with a known evil. I mean would it kill someone in the PC communications team to try to frame a single announcement in something other than tones of “dark times loom for Ontario but the PCs will steer us straight”?
But dark times do loom for Ontario. The deficit is staggering and people just don’t give a shit, apparently.
Or, they saw three parties who promised to eliminate that deficit, one of them a year earlier than the others, and made a choice between different approaches to doing so.
Sure, let’s pick the party that has raised taxes and ran up the deficit and lied to us repeatedly to fix our problems and lower the deficit. Good choice Ontario.
They could take the party increased the debt by 46% (during the boom years of the 90s, no less), and only did that well by downloading many of their expenses to the municipalities.
It’s not like the Liberals are the first ones to overspend, run year-on-year deficits, or struggle with a recession. But this time, they weren’t the ones promising an aggressive austerity approach, aiming to balance the budget rapidly while at the same time greatly reducing government revenues through significant corporate tax cuts. That message doesn’t seem to have resounded with anyone outside the conservative base.
Even if moderate voters wanted to turf the liberals after 10 years of accumulated scandals, where would could they have turned? The NDP managed to gain votes, but it looks like the centre-right stuck with the Liberals, unable to accept the far-right PC plan.
Because the federal Liberals balanced the budget by decreasing transfer payments to the provinces. It’s all interrelated really.
People would care if the province’s credit rating got drastically downgraded, or something along those lines.
Using only the ammo he provided them. Seriously, did he take lessons at the Michael Ignatieff School of Charm?
Consider that most people knew these facts and yet still could not be persuaded to vote PC.
Honestly looking back at the campaign all the winner had to do was not be the Liberals. Hell even the Liberals did that by playing up Kathleen Wynne as not Dalton McGuinty. The PCs have an image problem. People seem to see them as mean, rural and miserly; the PCs see themselves as stern, forthright and frugal. Given only some voters as PC members the party has to frame their approach better.
When you have a centrist electorate and an old, tired and out of ideas centrist government, you don’t beat that government by being ideologically pure conservatives painting themselves as Ralph Klein MkII (or maybe Mike Harris MkII in this case). You beat it by stealing the centre from them and being more reasonable and having new ideas. Once you’re in power you can then try to shift the centre of political gravity in your preferred direction, gradually.
Case study: Saskatchewan’s 2003 election in which Hermanson led the Sask Party to defeat against an NDP government that hadn’t had a new idea since Romanow left office years earlier, followed by Brad Wall’s makeover of the party and total domination of provincial politics since.
That seems to be the consensus this morning.
Also, if Hudak called his 100,000 public service job cuts a hiring freeze (which it actually is) he would have attracted more voters.
Anyway, at least with a majority the Liberals don’t need to kowtow to the NDP on every confidence bill, so this might actually work if Wynne can get serious about deficit reduction.
No, they won’t.
Most people do not know what Ontario’s credit rating is or how a downgrade would affect them. I bet a lot of voters, a very significant percentage, don’t know Ontario has a credit rating at all. I assure you that you are wildly, wildly overestimating how much a voter knows at all about how the province works. Most voters do not know the platforms of the parties or the details of how they would affect things. I’m not saying people are stupid - they’re not - but following politics, much less understanding economics or finance, simply isn’t on most people’s radar. The average Ontario voter, of any party, really didn’t know what the hell they were voting for or against. There’s informed people on this board, but this is not a good sample. IRL I knew almost nobody who knew the facts beyond “many scandals” and “Hudak said he’d fire people.”
People will notice if things affect them personally. If Ontario’s credit rating is downgraded, resulting in the government having no choice but to make massive cuts, people will be angry about the cuts.
[QUOTE=Leaffan]
Anyway, at least with a majority the Liberals don’t need to kowtow to the NDP on every confidence bill, so this might actually work if Wynne can get serious about deficit reduction.
[/QUOTE]
Massive cuts are coming. **It is a mathematical certainty. ** Within the next 5 years, maybe 10 if there is an economic boom I don’t see coming, Ontario’s government will have absolutely no choice but to cut, and cut big time. Wynne will end up having no choice but to do what Hudak said he’d do. The advantage to voting in Hudak is it’d get done a little faster and so the cuts would not have had to be quite as deep.
Let me rephrase my point:
I can imagine a story about the Ontario economy that voters might care about, but it would have to be a million times scarier and more personal than “This number is very large!!” or even “It’s a mathematical certainty that this number is very large!!”
Something along the lines of what Canada and the Chretien Liberals were hearing in the 1990s. The only other things we’d need is a powerless left wing party and a strident semi-marginal fiscal party that by continually advocating for radical fiscal cuts gives the government cover to reorganize their fiscal house.
That’ll never happen.
Clearly, the Ontario voters still have deep-seated PTSD over both Bob Rae and Mike Harris, and it’s hard to blame them.
These days, I’d actually take my chances with the NDP over the Conservatives, who have been sounding like a poor man’s U.S. Tea Party (that is, for a very poor man indeed)…
They can throw around accusations of wasted money all they want, but it’s still hard to see how the Conservatives are counter-offering anything that would make lives better for ordinary people in any tangible way. Is anyone talking about the fact that Ontario real estate is probably the most overvalued and absurdly expensive in the world?
What any provincial party could do about that I cannot begin to understand.
Not to mention the fact that it’s not even true.