11.25.2016 08:14 AM

It’s Forum. But, holy crap. Also, change chosen.

So:

Approval of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and her government is so low the Progressive Conservatives are in supermajority territory, a new poll shows.
The Tories would snap up 70 of the 107 seats at Queen’s Park if an election were imminent, the Forum Research phone survey of 1,184 people shows. The NDP would become the official opposition with 26 seats and the Liberals would hold just 11.

The whole nasty thing is here.

So, three things. 

One, it’s Forum. They’re the ones who said there’d be a Parti Québécois majority, a BC NDP majority, a Wildrose majority, and…you get the picture. 

Two, it’s a poll. Every single poll in the U.S. Presidential campaign got the outcome wrong, for weeks. Polls aren’t very reliable, these days. 

Three, it’s Ontario. In 2003, 2007 and 2011 and 2014, polls said the PCs would win. They didn’t. 

That all said, the Ontario Liberals – with whom, I wish to emphasize to the court, I have not been involved with for many years, Your Honour – obviously need to make some changes. 

This poll isn’t what they call an outlier. It’s reflective of other polls, internal and otherwise, in recent months. If it isn’t true, it’s probably pretty close to being true. 

It also reflects what folks at Queen’s Park – in all parties – are muttering in the corridors of near-power: 13 years on top is a long time. And: a variety of political chickens have now come home to roost – Hydro, pocketbook concerns (like, say, tolls), the most-recent ethical imbroglio, the shine coming off the Liberal brand as the Trudeau honeymoon fades, etc. etc. That kind of stuff. 

But the big one, the one that is hardest to overcome? Change. With Brexit, with Trump, “change” is just about impossible to beat, these days. At a certain point, the people just want it, you know? They want it. 

That all said, I will leave you with this: I possess a poll that says something totally different. It shows the Ontario Liberal Party – as a brand – is still the winning one. It shows the Libs can win again. 

But it also shows it wins only if it changes. 

Cue Ziggy Stardust.



24 Comments

  1. Ron says:

    Another collection of social conservative nutbars for the sake of change ? Oh great.

    • BlueGritr says:

      At this point, even as a loyal Liberal, I’d rather have a couple of “social conservative nutbars” over this incompetent bunch that has mismanaged every file they’ve touched. Time to bring in some business Liberals! Enough of the idealists.

  2. Ronald O'Dowd says:

    Warren,

    Can the Liberal caucus remain together if Wynne decides to hold her ground and fight right up to the election? There is nothing worse than losing an election by default.

    McGuinty called it quits. Will she follow?

    • Mark says:

      I think Wynne would rather quit if the risk of losing is large, so she will follow in her predecessor’s footsteps.

      • BlueGritr says:

        If Premier Wynne does decide to step down — I doubt she will — I hope the party can persuade either Sandra Pupatello or Dwight Duncan to lead the charge.

        • Ronald O'Dowd says:

          BlueGritr,

          My impression is that the appetite for change requires real new leadership, IF the Premier takes a walk. You simply can’t turn a party around with a leader who has been on the political scene, seemingly for ages. No disrespect intended but the electoral trend is clear across North America.

  3. billg says:

    I have owned and operated a small business in Ontario since 1978.
    Always purchased my material from a location in Ottawa and in Toronto.
    For the very first time in my business life I’ve started buying from a company in Montreal, product is the same, price is 20% cheaper.
    I really don’t think people understand the devastation the insane Green Energy act has had with what is now the highest electricity rates in North America.
    My budget for yearly Charitable donations are at an all time low.
    I no longer use the services of a very good Janitorial company who I had come in once a week.
    Drip, Drip, Drip.
    I understand the right vs left thing, and, the partisanship that goes along with it.
    But, this current government and its blind ideology has deeply hurt small business, and, hurt hundreds of thousands of people.
    If there is no political price to pay for screwing up on such a large and hurtful scale there will never be.

    • ottawacon says:

      The Green Energy Act only explains a small amount of the increase. Ontario spends ~16% of generation expenditure on green energy, for ~6% of total power generated. So, yes, it is expensive. But by definition, it can only be responsible for that 10% gap. The total expenditure on generation in 2014 for example was $11.7 billion – so one could make an argument that the Green Energy Act is costing around $1.2 billion a year that Ontario ratepayers should not be paying.

      The ugly story here is that the Ontario Liberals have been trying to greenwash horrific mismanagement of the energy file. In 2014, average Ontario hourly price was around 3 cents per kWH, while the ‘global adjustment’ charge was over 7 cents per kWh. Only a small percentage of global adjustment can be attributed to the Green Energy Act. Green energy may or may not be a luxury we cannot afford in Ontario, but the problem is a lot bigger than that.

      The 2015 Auditor’s report makes interesting reading. The 2016 edition comes out next week.

      • godot10 says:

        The ratepayers of Ontario are paying the full toll for upgrading the grid to handle the expensive intermittent so-called green energy. The producers of green energy don’t share any of that coast.

        The ratepayers of Ontario are paying the full toll for building the natural gas generators to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The producers of green energy don’t share any of that cost.

        The cost of so-called green energy is not only the cost of the energy itself, but the cost of the upgrades required by the grid, and the cost of the backup power that has to be available, plus the cost of the losses when that green energy is giving away nearly for free to Michigan and New York.

        The windfall profits of the Bay Street friends of the Liberals who own the green energy projects are sacrosanct.

        Justin and Gerry are taking this boondoggle economics national with their privatization bank for the global 1%’er.s

  4. redraven says:

    trump change. i am so stealing that:)

  5. MF says:

    Polls can be wrong, but they’re typically not drastically wrong. The US election polls weren’t actually very wrong on a national level. They got a few states wrong. The last article that I saw from 538 said that Clinton would get 48.7% and Trump would get 45.3%. The results were 48.1% to 46.6%.

    Forum’s polls in the Alberta were pretty accurate. Public sentiment changed over the course of the campaign, but their final polls reflected that.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_general_election,_2015#Opinion_polls

    When polls say the popular vote is going to be 43-24-24, it could be 5% off of that, but it’s not going to be 20% off. Wynne’s in trouble and will be tempted to run some serious old school politics between now and the election to drum up some votes.

    • Matt says:

      She’s in trouble…………………….now.

      A week is a long time in politics, never mind 18 months until the next election.

      • Tod Cowen says:

        The LA Times poll showed numerous national leads for Trump. The Washington Post trashed the poll’s methodology, and ran their own poll showing a Clinton national lead. Oops.

        PS–not that I welcome Trump. Quite the opposite. And the real polling failures were in the Great Lakes swing states.

  6. rww says:

    I’ve thought that if the Tories were the Tories of Davis and Robarts they would have won either or both of the last two elections. If the NDP had a different leader they might have had a chance. People prefer the Liberals philosophically but there is only so much politics first and corruption they can take. The Liberals are right on energy policy but high electricity costs are hurting them.

    If Brown can appear moderate (notwithstanding his newest MPP) and not do something stupid mid-campaign the Tories might actually pull it off. Pre-campaign polls never take into account the doing something stupid mid-campaign factor.

    • Brenda says:

      They are not right on the energy policy – it is killing Ontario! Hydro electric is green and it is being shut off to use overly expensive wind and solar which will never be able to supply a reliable supply of electricity to meet our needs. The cost is reflective of the fact that they over paid for the electricity even when there no wind or solar power being added to the supply. It is the dumbest move I have ever seen to try to buy votes, except maybe cancelling two plants close to where the electricity is needed after they had started construction in order to build in sites where they had not been elected.

      • doconnor says:

        One advantage hydro power has is that it can ramp production up or down depending on supply and demand. There there is a lot of wind and solar being generated, its better to store the water until it is needed.

  7. monkey says:

    I agree Ontario is still probably more a small l liberal province than a small c conservative one, but the Liberals will have been in power for almost 15 years by next election and anytime a party is in power that long baggage starts to collect up. I’ve found the longer a party is in power the harder they tend to fall when they lose while shorter stints in power lead to smaller defeats usually. In many ways Wynne’s numbers are very similar to Greg Selinger’s at this point and we all know what happened in Manitoba. Now the PCs could still lose if they do something stupid and that is the big if. But if Wynne is still the leader and the PCs mess up, I suspect the NDP will benefit more. I could be wrong, but I cannot realistically see the Liberals winning with Wynne as their leader (with a different leader maybe), mind you I couldn’t see Harper winning in 2006 and Trump in 2016 so maybe Wynne will shock us and win again, but I wouldn’t bet on it. As for the polls they are a snapshot of where things are now, not a predictor. US polls were only off within the margin of error, it was rather the state ones that were off although even there only in Wisconsin was Clinton’s lead outside the merging of error and there were almost no polls in that state in the final two weeks. In Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Clinton was ahead but within the margin of error.

  8. Matt says:

    Warren wrote:
    “I possess a poll that says something totally different. It shows the Ontario Liberal Party – as a brand – is still the winning one. It shows the Libs can win again. But it also shows it wins only if it changes”

    Would that be the one that says the Liberals could be re-elected in Ontario if a certain person were to resign as Premier?

    • monkey says:

      I think he might long term. Anytime a party is in power for over a decade, the desire for change will be strong and winning will be an uphill battle no matter what. When you look at brand name, you look at long term trends, which party wins more often than the other. While PCs have a better winning record overall, since the 80s the Liberals have done better so I wouldn’t be surprised if the PC time in power is shorter than the Liberals was. The main thing is will they learn or will they be stupid like the PCs and keep shooting themselves in the foot.

  9. André says:

    Change is good, or change can be bad, but change for the sake of change is a crapshoot!

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