Ontario 2011 provincial election

Anyone have any comments to make about the upcoming (Oct 2011) Ontario provincial election?

Personally, I’m not very excited about it, but I’m slightly baffled by the Conservatives TV ads. Does their entire platform consist of “the Liberals raised taxes”? That’s not much to run on, in my opinion.

It was initially very effective, and it does attack the McGuinty govenrment on its main weakness, which is it rather astounding level of dishonesty. Even by political standards they’re pretty major league liars.

I wonder, though, if the Tories didn’t blow the effect too early. They’re starting to wear off, and the thing is that they aren’t impanting anything in people’s minds that wasn’t already there; McGuinty already had a reputation for being a liar. The pledge not to raise taxes was broken before the LAST election, and in the most egregious and flagrant manner. So

  1. There’s a sense that this is old news, and
  2. “He a liar” is often an ineffective attack because these days people assume all politicians are liars.

The Tories also screwed up by characterizing some Canadian citizens as “foreigners,” for which they were absolutely torn apart in both liberal and conservative media, and which distracted from their platform.

What I find curious is that the NDP has been a total non-presence, and yet the projections say they’re going to pick up seats.

Trying to blame a politician for being a weasel about tax increases is like charging a criminal with perjury for saying “I didn’t do it”. I never thought I’d start feeling sympathetic towards McGuinty, but I guess anything’s possible.

By the way, I just saw another commercial saying “Dalton McGuinty is the Taxman!”, but this time it had a female narrator instead of a male narrator. Does that count as variety?

No one has any last minute comments? I haven’t been following it too closely, but it sounds like it could be either a Conservative or Liberal minority gov’t.

I will be deeply disappointed if the Liberals win. For me the main issue is that none of the choices are particularly good. I just know that I can’t vote Liberal based on all the crap they have done in the short time I have been in Toronto.

Hudak should have been able to make this election a slam dunk. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen, although he may still be able to eke out a minority. Or it could be a Liberal minority. All I know is that we have a massive provincial debt and it’s not going to get reduced any time soon. I can’t believe that this isn’t more of an issue than it is. Doesn’t anyone care that Ontario now has a $245 billion debt?

OK Dalton, you’ve had your chance; you fucked it up. Can we please give someone else a turn?

“Don’t you just hate those guys?” doesn’t make for a very strong platform, IMO.

The lot of them suck. Dalton has proven he’s not very good, Hudak keeps attacking the liberals for things that are either unimportant or just made up, while avoiding real issues, and the NDP candidate…I don’t even know who it is. So the choice is the evil we know, or the evil we don’t?

That’s a pretty ignorant opinion. I don’t think you should be allowed to vote.

I’ll admit that not knowing that who the NDP leader is is kind of ignorant. However I fail to see how the rest of it is. Dalton does have a fairly poor track record, Hudak is attacking the Liberals for completely made up reasons, like the cross-dressing pamphlet thing, or the bill to support newly arrived immigrants. I’ll admit I haven’t been paying it a huge amount of attention, or as much as I should, because the Liberal candidate in my riding is almost completely certain of winning, barring some kind of colossal meltdown, but I still don’t see how exactly it’s ignorant. And for the record I can’t vote. I’m only sixteen.

It doesn’t help either that Hudak’s plan to deal with the deficit and economic problems seems to be limited to the Tea Party “Cut taxes!” mantra. (Not that a provincial premier has much real influence on the economy.)

I’m not going to have any effect with my vote, anyway, since I live in the McGuinty family fiefdom.

Well that was spectacularly pointless.

Interesting bit, my son’s 5th grade class spent the past 3 weeks going over elections, government structure and ultimately participated in a province wide Student Vote. Results here.

Summary (Actual vs. Student)
Liberal (Actual) 53 Seats with 38% / (Student) 39 Seats with 26%
PC (Actual) 37 Seats with 35% / (Student) 24 Seats with 21%
NDP (Actual) 17 Seats with 23% / (Student) 41 Seats with 27%
Green (Actual) 0 Seats with 3% / (Student) 3 Seats with 16%

Bookkeeper, sorry to say Ottawa South went McGuinty as well.

A new record for lowest voter turnout! Woo hoo!

By the way, does provincial election funding in Ontario work the same way as federal election funding (i.e. every vote for a particular party translates to a certain amount of funding in the next election, assuming you get enough votes)?

Don’t think so. I found this Green Party link

That seems to imply that a federal type party funding structure does not exist for Ontario parties. The cite continues with a replacement proposal so it isn’t as if magic happened and funding appeared.

Well, I like the fact that all of Mississauga now counts as “urban” & "sophisticated’ in political terminology. In other words, all Mississauga seats went Liberal.

is there an online map of the ridings somewhere, showing the red/blue/orange distribution? I’ve tried to find one, unsuccessfully.

There’s a map on the CBC, obviously!

Is it kind of sad that I got more amusement out of the shifting red and blue bar over the “majority” line than I did out of the end of the Habs-Leafs game?

I loved this headline: Ontario’s re-elected premier touts 'major minority.

Major minority? That does sound double plus good, doesn’t it?

He’s just thrilled he didn’t get punted. The PCs managed to drop a 10 point lead on a disliked incumbent - by all rights they should have won yet managed to blow it.

Though give the chance to look a the PC policies it’s no great loss.

I think hogarth nailed it. The PCs didn’t really have any platform other than saying the Libs suck and are going to raise taxes. The Liberals had a platform, granted I didn’t agree with it, but they had one. The NDP at least put down a few planks for a platform.