Ford’s party attracts social-conservatives like like flies to shit, including the worst of them who are intent on limiting personal rights and freedoms, and the extremist alt-right crazies. For example, Ford had to dump Tanya Granic Allen due to her extreme-right positions. Half a year back, when Andre Marin in Ottawa-Vanier was pushing for the Ontario Conservative party to move toward the centre as a big tent party, and specifically warning that social conservatives were a threat to the party, nineteen year old religious zealot Sam Oosterhof was elected in a by-election in Niagara-West Glanbrook. Rather than decrying Ezra Levant and his hard alt-right Rebel Media for what it is, members of the Conservative party keep going in for interviews by an outfit that loses ethics complaints and libel actions against it as it treads the hate line. What happened to the GOP in the USA has now happened to the Ontario Conservative Party.
That’s about the only home for social conservatives who want to be in a legit party but “attracts them like flies to shit” is silly.
The most recent fly to land: Andrew Lawton, with Ford’s excuse being that the guy was crazy and fired from a radio station in March, but he’s feeling better and better now.
Not a Canadian, but reading this reminded me of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8KdtJOCzOU
Press on.
Stolen from Inspector Dreyfus of Pink Panther fame.
So, his mental illness from prior to 2013 excuses his comments from 2015? That’s some powerful crazy, there. :rolleyes:
“…which is why I’m qualified to run for office!”
Seriously? These are the people the PCs think should run the province?
:smack::smack::smack:
Another fly up Kiiwetinoong way: Anne Ayotte.
I am of the opinion that what is presented in the link allegedly by her is a hate crime.
Interesting polls: suggest that NDP may be rising in the polls due to strategic voting plans:
Ontario election: NDP overtakes Liberals as the ‘Anti-Ford’ party, according to Ipsos poll
PCs: 40%
NDP: 35%
Liberals: 22%
Other: 3%
Even so, 40% is usually enough for a majority, unless the support is badly skewed by riding. Eric Grenier’s projections in the CBC link I posted in the first post still gives the PCs a 94.4% chance of winning a majority.
And an article which suggests that the NDP’s surge is mainly coming at the expense of the Liberals, so ultimately the PCs benefit from a split in the centre-left votes.
NDP surge in polls no guarantee it’s a true contender in Ontario election: pollsters
Can you imagine a more tone deaf group of people than the Hydro One board of directors?
That doesn’t surprise me much. Anyone likely to abandon the PCs have pretty much already done it by now. The key now is getting enough liberals to switch to the NDP. That will be difficult, but if they’re really up to 35%, and this number isn’t just a fluke in the daily polls, it just might be possible.
Man, if you’d told me 10 years ago I would be voting NDP to try to avoid a PC majority, I’d have laughed long and hard. How the hell did we get here?
Well, personally, I blame this guy.
The economy was in the gutter when the NDP came into power. Rae was able to get us back on track by forcing the Social Contract, including Rae Days, on many public employees. The unions backlash was so fierce that he dumped the NDP. It’s ironic that he significantly the improved the province’s financial situation, but the NDP is labelled as being financially irresponsible, and its ironic that the unions would have been far better off with Ray than they were under Harris who cut about 6,000 nurses, who knows how many MOE and MNR employees.
As far as Ford’s economic platform goes, I don’t see it being very useful. Some tax cuts for the upper middle class to be paid for out of . . . crickets (well, no, not actually crickets – there won’t be as many of them under Ford, for he has promised to loosen environmental regulations which in turn will harm the land and waters that are so dear to me, and has promised to make cuts in the civil service which will cost my sole proprietorship a few hundred bucks per week due to ensuing courthouse delays).
Over the years I’ve voted Conservative, Liberal and NDP (and on one occasion would have voted green but for living on the wrong side of town), each of which was financially responsible at the time, but I’ve never voted for a bad person or a party led by a bad person. Ford is a bad person who keeps attracting even worse people. Little good will come from that, just as nothing good has come out of it in the USA.
Thanks for all the posts about the “flies”, Muffin.
They’re not showing up on my feeds out west.
Another fly soon to be followed by a swarm of flies: Simmer Sandhu resigned as the PC candidate for Brampton East because of allegations that he was one of 29 PC candidates who were elected as candidates by paying people to repeatedly vote using names stolen from the 407/ETR toll highway electronic payment database.
From a reporter to Doug Ford: “We have sources telling us that 29 of your candidates paid substantial amounts of money to use a specific method to win your candidacy. And that method is international students were paid a couple hundred dollars per trip, and they would vote using names off the 407 ETR list. Basically, identity theft. And 29 of your candidates were elected using this method.” Here’s the vid.
That’s weird. Why would 29 candidates work together like that? Or did Sandhu just go shopping around his data?
Either way, the Liberal machine is definitely winning the dirt war.
That is absolutely false. The unemployment rate was at a seven year LOW when Rae came to power. It was in fact doing pretty well, and began getting worse during Rae’s term, not before. whether that was the fault of Rae’s government or not, or to what extent it was their fault, is of course a matter of complex debate, but it is plainly not true to state the economy was in the gutter in 1990. It wasn’t super duper strong, but it was not in especially bad shape and was WAY better than in the reasonably recent past (from 1990.) 1991, by contrast, was a dreadful year.
Ontario’s fiscal situation was worse in 1995 than it was in 1990. There is no doubt whatsoever about that.
The first budget year under Rae was the single greatest deficit in the history of the province to that point, as opposed to under Peterson, when the debt had not really risen much at all. The NDP’s second budget broke that record. Their third broke the record again. The fourth didn’t break the record but would still have been a record were it not for the previous three. Debt-to-GDP ratio almost tripled under Rae, an accomplishment unmatched on the modern history of this province, before or since.
Again, we can debate whether that was Rae’s fault - deficits get bad when economies decline, though things actually did not get as bad, in percentage terms, during the 2008 fiscal crisis. But it is just not true to say the financial situation was better as a result of the Rae government; it was by any measure a lot worse. One can of course argue that it would have bene even worse than that were it not for Rae Days, but, honestly, “things are way worse, but would have been slightly worse still if he hadn’t forced people to take days off without pay” isn’t a ringing endorsement.
That’s largely because it isn’t really a coherent platform, it’s just a grab bag of promises meant to appease a variety of voting blocs. Ford has no ideology, and scarecely can be said to even have ideas beyond that he should be Premier.
I was mistaken. Thanks, RickJay, for for correcting me. I should have left it at:
Have to say, RickJay’s summary matches my recollection as well: huge deficit spending under Rae.