Tom Clark

Election time: Dinosaurs poised to take Ontario
June 2018

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The Canadian winter that persisted into a late April snowstorm has transitioned into late May summer through a few days of intense spring in between. May has also brought a fateful election campaign to Ontario. At this same time a Colombian friend of ours lamented, about their election of a president, that if Colombians had been dinosaurs they would vote for the meteorite. As I write, an Uribista candidate who wants to reopen the peace agreement in Colombia and spend more on the military is in the lead, while the other candidate for president is a former guerrilla fighter and then mayor of Bogota who seeks a humane Colombia with a 21st century welfare state. It sounds familiar - night versus day. We understand that feeling as we survey our own Ontario election scene.

We have had over a decade of Liberal government in Ontario. They inevitably made mistakes, and some bad mistakes. But some things were not mistakes. For example, the initiative to promote green energy by offering incentives to solar and wind energy was necessary - and it inevitably brought costs. Somehow the Liberal Party defied the odds at the last election in 2014. With help from a disastrous Conservative election campaign and a contentious NDP campaign platform, the Liberals won another term. Objectively, their last four years in power have not been years of bad government. But the sense of the predecessor's cover-up on hydro plant cancellations and the sense that Liberals’ were ruling on overtime pervaded the media discourse. That sense of borrowed time never went away. As this June 2018 election grew nearer, the polls gave the Conservatives a huge lead - for no good reason, and certainly not because they offered a program of alternatives.

Earlier this year there was a bewildering swirl of events in the Conservative party. Conservative leader Patrick Brown resigned, ostensibly because of the risk that his treatment of women would be problematic in the "me too" era. But there were also muddy accounts of his improperly stacking the Conservative party membership lists with supporters of his brand of Conservatism. He then attempted a denial of his behaviour and made a partial comeback before withdrawing again. No doubt this display of shining integrity puts him in a good position to run federally for the Conservatives in 2019!

For me, there was some good news in all the Conservative games. There are some people with some integrity in the Conservative party in Ontario who took initiative to clean up what appears to have been a populist takeover of their party. After all, in Ontario it is the Progressive Conservative party. Federally it is the Conservative party. That is important because a majority of Ontarians can be described as progressive. A government reflecting Ontarians should have a capacity to follow progressive policies. Historically, both Conservatives and Liberals have done that. It was likely that some Ontario Conservatives wanted to try that again. However, things went off the rails.

The rushed Conservative leadership contest had skilled Conservatives and Conservatives with Provincial government experience vying for the leadership. Yet the party elected as its leader populist Doug Ford - brother of the infamous former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. The leader's claim to be for the people is the simplistic populist call of the rich - which he is. He claims to have skills in delivering cuts, a skill developed while he was in City Council - a claim related to the nonsense surrounding his brother's claim of stopping a fictitious Toronto "gravy train." Ford is inexperienced and ignorant of Provincial government - but if you're for the people experience doesn't matter. There is no costed Conservative platform - just slogans. Among the string of promises: dropping the carbon tax, cutting the tax on gas, making tax cuts, cutting inefficiencies - all of which the CBC showed to add up to be beyond the capacity of the Provincial budget. In fact anything on a right wing wish list has been promised. Finally, the Liberals released troubling evidence that Ford had been involved in the same kind of party membership shenanigans that helped topple former leader Patrick Brown.

In complete contrast, for this election the NDP produced a remarkable progressive costed-out platform. Surprisingly this remarkable platform has by-and-large met with media indifference. The NDP show they can deliver drug and dental coverage, childcare, and post-secondary grants for university students all by a modest increase in tax on the rich. There is some evidence this program has appeal among Ontarians. But when the NDP rose higher in the polls so did the name-calling and NDP fear-mongering.

As the June 7 Election Day approaches we have a Liberal government that has largely done what science and related advice called for. We have incentives for green energy and a carbon tax in line with Quebec and California. We have an economy as good as it gets with respect to employment levels, and we have some movement towards better health and drug programs. Yet the Liberals are down in the polls. The NDP faces a barrage of Conservative TV advertising saying simply an NDP government would be a disaster.

The majority of votes in Ontario are usually progressive. That is, the sum of Liberal plus NDP votes are usually a majority. So it can be expected that in elections the kinds of progressive Liberal and NDP programs are what the majority want. And this time there is appreciable overlap in programs between the two. Yet Ontario seems poised to elect Conservatives whose Trump-style leader has promised to ditch the progressive possibilities that the majority almost inevitably want, in favour of such things as tax cuts to the rich. To get the taste of the Conservative platform "petitions" I looked online on May 30th. In the top left hand box "More Beer and Wine" was the enlightened promise! The Ontario Trump will kill the carbon tax and other green energy initiatives that we paid for. Moreover he will even cut the general tax level on gasoline - an action that can only encourage bigger SUVs pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. (Personally, I want to go beyond a tax on gasoline. I want to limit the proportion of higher-gas-consumption vehicles sold, much as California required a proportion of cars sold to be hybrids.) The populists are like those teenagers who don't want anyone telling them what to do. They don't want science or facts constraining their intuition. Of course, I do want science and facts very much involved in determining what a government does towards my grandchildren's future.

The Ontario situation may be more tragic than Colombia's -- although theirs could mean war or peace. I say more tragic because in Colombia the dinosaurs can vote for a President and if they are the majority, a dinosaur President will be elected. In Ontario, there are unlikely to be enough dinosaurs to be in the majority like that. The tragedy in Ontario could be that a significant number of dinosaurs will be able to use our election system to elect a government espousing certain regressive programs even though the majority of the votes cast are by non-dinosaurs who did not support those programs. Ontario elections are good for situations like Trump’s. He didn't get the most votes. But the US election system elected him anyway.

Postscript: Running up to the June 7th election day, the Toronto Star endorsed the NDP. Although the Globe & Mail produced a brutal editorial against Ford and the lack of substantial program, it could not endorse the NDP. The Globe could not endorse a "doctrinaire" party linked to unions. It seemed blind to the fact that worrying about business interests, competitiveness and profits was a doctrinaire business bias. The upswing of NDP in the polls was stalled. The Tories won a majority of seats in the legislature. Ford is to be Premier. Yet over 60% of Ontarians, a clear majority, voted for the Liberal or NDP explicit platforms with their social programs like Pharmacare and University Scholarships that the Globe & Mail had identified as timely. The Liberals and NDP won a minority of the seats.

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Election time: Dinosaurs poised to take Ontario June 2018 Click square for index The Canadian winter that persisted into a late April snowstorm has transitioned into late May summer through a few days of intense spring in between. May has also brought a fateful election campaign to Ontario. At this same time a Colombian friend of ours lamented, about their election of a president, that if Colombians had been dinosaurs they would vote for the meteorite. As I write, an Uribista candidate who wants to reopen the peace agreement in Colombia and spend more on the military is in the lead, while the other candidate for president is a former guerrilla fighter and then mayor of Bogota who seeks a humane Colombia with a 21st century welfare state. It sounds familiar - night versus day. We understand that feeling as we survey our own Ontario election scene. We have had over a decade of Liberal government in Ontario. They inevitably made mistakes, and some bad mistakes. But some things were not mistakes. For example, the initiative to promote green energy by offering incentives to solar and wind energy was necessary - and it inevitably brought costs. Somehow the Liberal Party defied the odds at the last election in 2014. With help from a disastrous Conservative election campaign and a contentious NDP campaign platform, the Liberals won another term. Objectively, their last four years in power have not been years of bad government. But the sense of the predecessor's cover-up on hydro plant cancellations and the sense that Liberals’ were ruling on overtime pervaded the media discourse. That sense of borrowed time never went away. As this June 2018 election grew nearer, the polls gave the Conservatives a huge lead - for no good reason, and certainly not because they offered a program of alternatives. Earlier this year there was a bewildering swirl of events in the Conservative party. Conservative leader Patrick Brown resigned, ostensibly because of the risk that his treatment of women would be problematic in the "me too" era. But there were also muddy accounts of his improperly stacking the Conservative party membership lists with supporters of his brand of Conservatism. He then attempted a denial of his behaviour and made a partial comeback before withdrawing again. No doubt this display of shining integrity puts him in a good position to run federally for the Conservatives in 2019! For me, there was some good news in all the Conservative games. There are some people with some integrity in the Conservative party in Ontario who took initiative to clean up what appears to have been a populist takeover of their party. After all, in Ontario it is the Progressive Conservative party. Federally it is the Conservative party. That is important because a majority of Ontarians can be described as progressive. A government reflecting Ontarians should have a capacity to follow progressive policies. Historically, both Conservatives and Liberals have done that. It was likely that some Ontario Conservatives wanted to try that again. However, things went off the rails. The rushed Conservative leadership contest had skilled Conservatives and Conservatives with Provincial government experience vying for the leadership. Yet the party elected as its leader populist Doug Ford - brother of the infamous former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. The leader's claim to be for the people is the simplistic populist call of the rich - which he is. He claims to have skills in delivering cuts, a skill developed while he was in City Council - a claim related to the nonsense surrounding his brother's claim of stopping a fictitious Toronto "gravy train." Ford is inexperienced and ignorant of Provincial government - but if you're for the people experience doesn't matter. There is no costed Conservative platform - just slogans. Among the string of promises: dropping the carbon tax, cutting the tax on gas, making tax cuts, cutting inefficiencies - all of which the CBC showed to add up to be beyond the capacity of the Provincial budget. In fact anything on a right wing wish list has been promised. Finally, the Liberals released troubling evidence that Ford had been involved in the same kind of party membership shenanigans that helped topple former leader Patrick Brown. In complete contrast, for this election the NDP produced a remarkable progressive costed-out platform. Surprisingly this remarkable platform has by-and-large met with media indifference. The NDP show they can deliver drug and dental coverage, childcare, and post-secondary grants for university students all by a modest increase in tax on the rich. There is some evidence this program has appeal among Ontarians. But when the NDP rose higher in the polls so did the name-calling and NDP fear-mongering. As the June 7 Election Day approaches we have a Liberal government that has largely done what science and related advice called for. We have incentives for green energy and a carbon tax in line with Quebec and California. We have an economy as good as it gets with respect to employment levels, and we have some movement towards better health and drug programs. Yet the Liberals are down in the polls. The NDP faces a barrage of Conservative TV advertising saying simply an NDP government would be a disaster. The majority of votes in Ontario are usually progressive. That is, the sum of Liberal plus NDP votes are usually a majority. So it can be expected that in elections the kinds of progressive Liberal and NDP programs are what the majority want. And this time there is appreciable overlap in programs between the two. Yet Ontario seems poised to elect Conservatives whose Trump-style leader has promised to ditch the progressive possibilities that the majority almost inevitably want, in favour of such things as tax cuts to the rich. To get the taste of the Conservative platform "petitions" I looked online on May 30th. In the top left hand box "More Beer and Wine" was the enlightened promise! The Ontario Trump will kill the carbon tax and other green energy initiatives that we paid for. Moreover he will even cut the general tax level on gasoline - an action that can only encourage bigger SUVs pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. (Personally, I want to go beyond a tax on gasoline. I want to limit the proportion of higher-gas-consumption vehicles sold, much as California required a proportion of cars sold to be hybrids.) The populists are like those teenagers who don't want anyone telling them what to do. They don't want science or facts constraining their intuition. Of course, I do want science and facts very much involved in determining what a government does towards my grandchildren's future. The Ontario situation may be more tragic than Colombia's -- although theirs could mean war or peace. I say more tragic because in Colombia the dinosaurs can vote for a President and if they are the majority, a dinosaur President will be elected. In Ontario, there are unlikely to be enough dinosaurs to be in the majority like that. The tragedy in Ontario could be that a significant number of dinosaurs will be able to use our election system to elect a government espousing certain regressive programs even though the majority of the votes cast are by non-dinosaurs who did not support those programs. Ontario elections are good for situations like Trump’s. He didn't get the most votes. But the US election system elected him anyway. Postscript: Running up to the June 7th election day, the Toronto Star endorsed the NDP. Although the Globe & Mail produced a brutal editorial against Ford and the lack of substantial program, it could not endorse the NDP. The Globe could not endorse a "doctrinaire" party linked to unions. It seemed blind to the fact that worrying about business interests, competitiveness and profits was a doctrinaire business bias. The upswing of NDP in the polls was stalled. The Tories won a majority of seats in the legislature. Ford is to be Premier. Yet over 60% of Ontarians, a clear majority, voted for the Liberal or NDP explicit platforms with their social programs like Pharmacare and University Scholarships that the Globe & Mail had identified as timely. The Liberals and NDP won a minority of the seats. TOP Click:
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