187 Search Results for wynne

I and others got burned in Ontario’s election, big time, when we started to believe in this “likely voter” category.  Right until election night on June 12, it made sense to me that “likely voters” are the demographic that we need to pay the most attention to – and, as such, the Ontario Liberals and Ontario PCs were therefore tied in voter intention.

Before I was going to go on air, however, I ran into Abacus’ David Coletto (now on his honeymoon – hi, David!) and asked him this: “Um, have you pollster guys worked out what this ‘likely voter’ category is, perchance?”

Said David: “No.”

Uh-oh.

The rest is history.  The “likely voters” weren’t nearly as “likely” as we’d been told.  A (very likeable) Kathleen Wynne and her Ontario Liberal election team won a majority when (a rather dislikable) Tim Hudak’s PCs snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with their 100,000 pink slips craziness.

Do we in the media, and sundry pollsters, learn from past mistakes? Ha! Surely you jest!

Thus, this morning, we have Angus Reid Global telling us that, among “likely voters,” the Harper Conservatives and Trudeau Liberals are now tied.  Read it right here.

Me, I don’t believe it.  Once bitten, twice shy.  Fool me once, yadda yadda.

Trudeau is ahead, full stop.  That’s what my gut is telling me, and I shouldn’t have ever stopped going with it.  Hasn’t failed me, ever.

Likely? Schmikely.

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…that’s the Toronto Sun’s Andy Donato. Said David Miller was Hitler, thinks battering women like Kathleen Wynne is funny.

He cartooned Yours Truly this fine morn, so someone decided to cartoon Andy right back. Pretty accurate likeness, I’d say.

 

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It’s been a somewhat frustrating 17 months. So I was very, very happy to see this photo, taken at the Throne Speech.

Never run away from anything, Churchill liked to say. (Particularly the past – it never works.) Glad to see some have learned that lesson.

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As by-election results rolled in on the evening of June 30, did Prime Minister Stephen Harper start contemplating the location of the nearest exit door?

It’s possible. After all, the quartet of by-elections arguably gave him plenty of cause for concern.

In the Alberta riding of Fort McMurray-Athabasca, his party’s candidate won handily, as most expected. But Team Harper received less than 6,000 of the nearly 84,000 entitled to vote. That means only about seven per cent of Fort Mac’s electorate were motivated enough to get off the couch and go vote Conservative. Also cause for concern: when contrasted to the 2011 general election, the Tory share of the vote in the riding shrunk by more than 20 per cent.

And the Liberals – the damned NEP-foisting socialist Liberals! – came a respectable second in Fort McMurray-Athabasca, the very heart of Alberta’s oil industry. They didn’t win, as the polling firm Forum Research had predicted. But the Trudeau Liberals are surging, even in places like Fort Mac, where all that previously preserved them were endangered species laws.

Turnout was similarly dire in a second Alberta riding, Macleod. There, the Conservatives won convincingly – but, as in Fort McMurray, the Liberals quadrupled their share of the vote from 2011. And, as in Fort McMurray, the Grits displaced the NDP as the Conservatives’ principal opponent.
Back East, where the remaining two by-elections were taking place in Toronto, the Conservatives were given much more to fret about.

In Scarborough-Agincourt, where the Tories were most competitive, the Liberals won all but one of 160 polls. They also received more than twice as many votes as the Conservatives – who had blanketed the riding with despicable leaflets that falsely claimed Justin Trudeau favoured the sale of marijuana to kids.

In Trinity-Spadina, meanwhile, the resurgent Liberals took back the riding they had held from 1993 to 2006. But the Conservatives received a measly five per cent of the vote – the same share as the Green Party candidate.

As is well-known, it’s foolish to suggest that by-elections portend general election results. Here in Ontario, for instance, Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals did poorly in a string of by-elections – and then won a stunning majority when all the votes were counted on June 12.

But, as he sifts through the by-election entrails, Harper can reliably extract three truths.

One, Justin Trudeau is no flash in the proverbial pan. His popularity endures. And millions spent on attack ads haven’t changed the reality: in the 50-odd polls that have been conducted since he became Liberal leader, Trudeau remains Canadians’ favourite choice to be Prime Minister.

Two, Canadians clearly want some sort of a change from Harper and/or his Conservatives. It isn’t scandal, so much, that has muddied the Conservative brand. It’s likelier the passage of time: nearly a decade in power have left the Conservatives looking decidedly tired and old. To many Canadians, they don’t represent places like Fort McMurray or Macleod in Ottawa anymore – they ARE Ottawa.

Three, Harper doesn’t have much to work with. Sure, he will boast about a federal budgetary surplus in the coming months – but with most provinces facing sizeable budgetary deficits, Harper’s fiscal success won’t be so clear-cut to many voters. And, apart from the surplus, what other issues can help Harper win support? Not ethics, and not social programs. What story will he tell on the hustings? It’s unclear.

Clearer, however, is that exit door. All that Stephen Harper need do is step through it.

And – presto – all of problems described above become someone else’s.

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My parents thought I was gay.

In Seventies-era Calgary, this was a rather big deal. I had been writing pro-gay editorials in my school papers, I had been listening continuously to the Tom Robinson Band’s British hit (‘Sing If You’re Glad to be Gay’), I visited the Parkside Continental more than once, I wore black all the time, and most my friends at Bishop Carroll High School were gay, closeted or otherwise. We were the art-music-poetry-punk rock crowd, and a gayer bunch could not be found in Calgary, in those days.

Things got a bit queer, as it were, when my parents heard the first single by my band, the Hot Nasties. On the lead tune, ‘Invasion of the Tribbles,’ I hollered that I wanted to “make sweet passionate love” to someone named “Johnny.” That little bit of lyricism got the eyebrows popping around our archly-conservative Lake Bonavista neighbourhood, let me tell you.

So – to make a long story short – my parents thought I was gay. We grew up in a pretty gay-positive household, because my Dad was an immunologist, and one of the first physicians in Canada to deal with what would come to be known as AIDS and HIV. Their concern, if I can call it that, was that I would get outed, and therefore beaten up in Calgary, which – in those days – happened a lot.

I wasn’t gay, but rumours persisted throughout high school and university that I was. Back then, it was a big deal.

Nowadays, apparently, it is no longer such a big deal. Case in point: Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

During the Ontario Liberal leadership campaign, plenty of folks – and not just red-necked mouth-breathers – wondered if Wynne’s sexual orientation would hurt her when the election rolled around. The “issue” never showed up in any public opinion polling, because no reputable pollster ever asked about it, to my knowledge. But folks in all three of Ontario’s main political parties quietly reflected on how a married gay Premier would play in, say, Bancroft.

To the credit of Wynne’s opponents – NDP leader Andrea Horwath, and soon-to-resign PC leader Tim Hudak – no mention was made of Wynne’s sexuality, implicitly or explicitly. It did not factor in the election in the way that jobs did, or some other issue. It didn’t come up.

Wynne won a majority, capturing five more seats than the 54 needed. She did so because Hudak’s vote collapsed, and because – take note, homophobes – she is a rather nice person. People liked her more than they liked the alternatives.

Wynne didn’t win because of some super-brilliant move by her strategists, or due to some extraordinary unprecedented event. She – the first openly-gay Ontario political leader – won because of HER. Her, the gay person. Voters thought about it, probably, and they ended up not caring.

The best response to her victory came from veteran journalist Kevin Newman. I loved what he wrote on Twitter: “Ontario has elected a woman who is openly gay. And it didn’t matter. I love my country. (Not a partisan endorsement. A human one).”

Whether you voted for Kathleen Wynne or not, whether you live in Ontario or not, how amazing it is that she won.

There are many more miles to go, of course. But – so far, so good.

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Liberal governments back in power, somewhat unexpectedly, in Quebec City and Toronto: does that help Justin Trudeau, or does it hurt him?

Depends who you ask. Conservatives are less preoccupied with what political scientists airily refer to as “alternation.” Liberals believe in it, as an article of faith. That’s why so many federal Grits are (publicly) claiming to be happy about the election of Premiers Couillard and Wynne – but are (privately) a bit apprehensive.

Alternation, if you are unfamiliar with the concept, is uniquely Canadian. It asserts that Canadian voters are (a) aware of the dualities that run through our politics, and (b) wisely offset said dualities to provide balance and harmony. So, for example, Liberals believe in alternating between French and English leaders. Conservatives don’t, although they seem to pay some heed to East-West leadership duality.

Alternation means that, whenever the Liberals have been in power in Ottawa, Conservatives have generally held sway in Toronto. The same holds true, more or less, for the Quebec City-Ottawa teeter-totter: whenever federalist Liberals have been ascendant in the nation’s capital, they have been moving in the opposite direction at Quebec’s National Assembly.

If alternation sounds like a lot of political hocus-pocus to you, you are not alone. There are clear exceptions to the alternation rule. For example, Liberal Dalton McGuinty first won power while Liberals Jean Chretien and Paul Martin ruled federally, an alternation aberration that went on for two years. And Grits haven’t always adhered to the alternating French-English leader rule, either: recently, and fleetingy, they had two back-to-back anglos as leader (Ignatieff and Rae).

That all said, Team Trudeau may admit that alternation causes them some indigestion. For the next four years, Premiers Couillard and Wynne will govern and, one hopes, be obliged to make difficult decisions. For the next four years, then, much of the Liberal action – fundraising, media attention and the better political staffers – will gravitate toward the provincial capitals.

Trudeau may argue that he is responsible for some of Wynne’s big win. He helped her out at a big mid-campaign rally, true, and he stumped for some Ontario Liberal candidates. But Trudeau could not stem the anti-Grit tide in February by-elections in Toronto or Niagara Falls, nor before that in Windsor or London in August. The Ontario Liberals were humbled in those places, Trudeau’s beneficence notwithstanding.

As he surveys the Ontario-Quebec results, however, Trudeau is certainly entitled to form the opinion that the Liberal brand is back. After 2011’s federal rout, many pundits were claiming that Liberal parties were doomed. But now Liberals rule the roost in B.C., Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and P.E.I., and big “L” liberalism looks anything but dead. Canadians seem to be migrating back to the political centre.

Three things stand in the way if Trudeau’s journey back to 24 Sussex, however. One, Stephen Harper is no Tim Hudak or Pauline Marois – he knows how to win, and Grits underestimate him at their peril. Two, Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats have not withered on the vine in Quebec – there, the NDP remain as popular as the Liberals, or more so. Three, Wynne and Couillard have revealed themselves to be disciplined, capable campaigners – and neither are guilty of verbal gaffes about abortion, the Ukraine, Chinese dictatorships or balanced budgets.

Alternation: it may simply be debate fodder for political scientists, sure.

Or, it could be the main thing that keeps Justin Trudeau from power in 2015.

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The first duty of intelligent people, said George Orwell, is to restate the obvious.

In politics, it isn’t done nearly enough.  So, let us state the obvious: Kathleen Wynne won a huge, impressive, astounding victory.  But she didn’t win so much as Tim Hudak lost.

Political reality (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is usually right out there in the open.  You don’t have to go looking for it. 

Now, sure: the tendency of the commentariat – the pollsters, the pundits, the progonosticators – is to pore through columns of data and election entrails, and ascribe some murky cause to unambiguous events.  But those in the punditocracy who got Ontario election 2014 decidedly wrong (and I was decidedly one, for again believing the pollsters), just need to pay closer attention to what is obvious. The big picture stuff.

The big picture stuff: poll after poll after poll, discredited as they so often are, showed the Ontario Liberal leader to be the most popular political leader around.  And those selfsame polls showed the Ontario Progressive Conservative leader to be the least popular.  It never really changed.

It certainly didn’t change when the interminable election campaign got going: it got more pronounced.  Ontario voters weren’t at all happy about serial Liberal controversies, of course.  But they liked Kathleen Wynne – female, gay, inheritor of said controversies – and her economic ideas didn’t worry them overmuch.

Tim Hudak, meanwhile, did.  They thought his economic plan – creating a million jobs, while simultaneously cutting 100, 000 jobs, and then confusing “person years” with “jobs” – was just too radical.  It didn’t make sense to them.  And, in the equivalency in media coverage that an election campaign gives to opposition leaders, Hudak came up short.

There was something in his alchemy – something in his essence, his DNA – that voters just didn’t like.  They never warmed to him, not once.

Sure, Hudak won the single leader’s debate.  Sure, he won more newspaper endorsements than Wynne.  Sure, the pollsters were saying that he was the main beneficiary of a historically-high desire for change.

But they didn’t warm to him.  Wynne, they did.  So, when Hudak and his uncommonly insensible revolutionaries branded everything they did with Hudak’s face, they were courting disaster.  And disaster they got.

By placing an unpopular leader with an unpopular plan front and centre – by being more radical than Stephen Harper has ever, ever been on the hustings – Hudak’s party created the ideal circumstances for Kathleen Wynne to win big.

It’s that obvious.

Take a look at some of the numbers, if all that sounds too simplistic.  Wynne won eight more seats than Dalton McGuinty did in 2011 – but she did so with almost exactly the same popular vote, 38 per cent.  That is, she and McGuinty both won 38 per cent of a shrinking pool of votes – but she got a majority, and he didn’t.

Why?

Because the PC vote collapsed, that’s why.  They captured about 36 per cent of the popular vote in 2011.  On Thursday night, they got 31 per cent.  That drop, alone, accounted for Wynne’s big win.  That, alone – unpopular PC leader, unpopular PC economic plan – allowed the Ontario Liberals to do better than many folks ever expected they would.

Now, in political campaigns, it’s never one thing that determines outcomes, of course.

Other factors contributed to Wynne’s win, and Hudak’s loss.  Among them: Wynne’s war room – led by Bob Lopinski, Brian Clow, Rebecca Mackenzie and Fahim Kaderdina – were better than their PC and NDP equivalents.  Her lead campaign strategists – David Herle, Peter Donolo, Pat Sorbara, Tom Teahen and Andrew Bevan – kept a laser-like focus on the obvious realities: Wynne and her plan popular, Hudak and his plan unpopular.

(And, yes, Virginia, this writer did indeed write that sentence. Clip and save.)

Joe and Jane Frontporch, in their wisdom, always had the same perspective: they didn’t like Tim Hudak.  So, when Hudak turned the election into a referendum on himself, Joe and Jane voted accordingly.

It all may sound simple, and it may be restating the obvious: but after the shambolic mess that was Ontario election 2014, it is – as no less than Orwell said – our first duty, right?

Right.

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Comments (53)

Despicable.

Disgusting, dispiriting, deflating: Ontario’s 2014 election campaign has been all of those things, and more.

It is coming to a blessed end in two days’ time. But this grinding, joyless farce has given voters no shortage of reasons to refuse to participate. A sampling:

· Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne said on the weekend that Ontario’s NDP – with whom she has happily partnered for more than a year – were “Rob Ford-like.” That’s a quote.

· New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath – who has been the Liberals’ willing supplicant for more than a year – now calls Wynne and the Grits “corrupt” every chance she gets.

· Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, in his centerpiece economic “Million Jobs Plan,” says that “person years of employment” is the same thing as “jobs.” This means that he has over-estimated the number of jobs in his plan by a factor of eight. His plan should be called the “125,000 Jobs Plan.”

And so on, and so on. It has been, as noted, dispiriting. The party leaders have revealed nothing to inspire us. Turnout will be historically low, and they will have no one but themselves to blame.

There is more than enough blame to go around, however. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) deserve plenty for subverting democracy, too.

For those who fortuitously do not live here, the OPP are (as the name implies) our provincial police force. They are Ontario’s largest, numbering in the thousands. They carry guns and – lately – they have involved themselves in politics. A lot.

In the case of the aforementioned Rob Ford, the OPP went to great lengths to discredit the years-long effort of the Toronto Police Force to investigate Ford’s penchant for associating with drug-dealers. Videotapes notwithstanding, the OPP declared there was “no new evidence” that could be used in a prosecution of Ford, and thereby let Mayor Crackhead off the hook.

Then, there was the case of deleted emails at Queen’s Park, which weren’t actually deleted – they all still exist, in Ontario government servers out in Guelph. The OPP was undeterred: one of their officers appeared before a provincial legislative committee, and falsely stated that the supposed deleter of the emails wouldn’t speak to them (he would), and that the emails were gone (they weren’t). He did this under oath.

Then, mid-campaign, the OPP’s union started running attack ads against Hudak’s PCs. The ads said that Hudak would cause “labour strife” and urged voters to vote for anybody but him.

The OPP officers were constitutionally entitled to broadcast the ads. But in a democracy, the people we give guns and great power – the police, the military – shouldn’t ever be seen during election campaigns, much less heard from.

The OPP’s management, observing the backlash against their union’s Third World-style boot-stomping of democracy, decided to compensate. It leaked details of the Queen’s Park emails investigation – a criminal investigation – to the media. They, like their union, had decided to try and affect the outcome of the election by subverting the Liberals.

Nobody knows who will be Ontario’s next Premier. But if it’s either Hudak or Wynne, nobody would blame either leader for disbanding the despicable OPP, which is officially of control and, inarguably, completely lawless.

Weep for Ontario, Canada. Things are bad, here.

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If nothing else, they’ve become a law unto themselves. I have never seen anything like this. Ever.

One thing is certain: the OPP had better hope the NDP win. Hudak and Wynne now both have plenty of justification for shutting those bastards down.

 

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Comments (63)

I’ve had the privilege to help get Prime Ministers and Premiers ready for political debates. I always tell them debates are really just about two things.

One, looking and sounding like a leader. Two, using the debate to ratify your issues and policies.

That’s it.

Ontario’s leaders debate contained a few surprises, but no so-called ‘defining moments.’ Watching it, ten lessons can be drawn, for future political leaders to clip and save.

1. Undersell and overperform. Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s spinners did nothing to contradict the pre-debate impression that he was going to have a lousy night. Hudak’s strategy paid dividends: to everyone’s surprise, he looked and sounded like the winner.

2. TV is pictures. It’s 70 per cent how you look, 20 per cent how you say it, and ten per cent what you actually say. It almost didn’t matter that his economic plan has been shredded by the experts – because Hudak looked confident and in control. NDP leader Andrea Horwath sometimes appeared uncertain, and kept checking her cue cards. And Ontario Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne waved her arms around like a drowning person. Hudak won the pictures war.

3. Facts tell, stories sell. Lawyers, doctors, engineers and bureaucrats are lousy communicators – because, when stressed-out, they rely on jargon and acronyms and statistics. They don’t tell stories; they regurgitate factoids. Wynne is like that: too often, she seems more like a Deputy Minister than a Premier. Hudak and Horwath, meanwhile, remembered they were guests in our living rooms, and spoke accordingly. It worked.

4. Debates are like rock’n’roll: Chuck Berry once said that it should take a long time to craft a great song – but only two minutes to sing it. So too political debates. You need to research your issue, and know it backwards and forwards. But you also need to be able to express it in a very brief elevator conversation. Hudak and Horwath did that.

5. KISS! Keep It Simple, Stupid, Bill Clinton advisor James Carville once wrote on the Democratic Party’s war room wall. The key, in debates, is to recall that voters have very busy lives, and no time to wade through political verbiage. Hudak was mocked by his adversaries for sounding like a salesman – but only because they know, in their hearts, that Hudak kept it simple, and made the sale.

6. It’s about “we,” not “me.” Voters know that politicians occupy a world filled with power and fame. They know that political life is not everyday life. But, just the same, voters want to feel that political leaders understand the challenges of their daily lives. They want to hear leaders talk about them (the “we”), and not just themselves (the “me”). Hudak won the debate because he constantly used the right pronoun.

7. Have two or three priorities, not 100. Former Prime Minister Paul Martin – who has been stumping for Wynne, and whose inexpert inner circle runs her campaign – once said that, if you have 100 priorities, you don’t have one. And he was right (but he didn’t ever follow his own advice). In the debate, Wynne and Horwath often recited laundry lists of policies, leaving Hudak to talk about his one main priority, jobs.

8. TV is about emotion, not information. Hudak knew that, and acted on it. He didn’t lecture or hector: he was easy-going and told stories. On TV, that’s the only approach that wins hearts and minds.

9. Don’t be melodramatic. TV is a cool medium, McLuhan said, and you can’t get too hot. Hudak’s one mistake was to occasionally get too-theatrical – Hope is on the way! I’ll resign if I don’t do what I say! – and he accordingly sounded silly. (Justin Trudeau could benefit for remembering this one, as well.)

10. Smile. Smile! Politics is a crazy business – and sometimes you just need to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Hudak looked like he was enjoying himself. The other two didn’t.

Hudak won the debate – but that doesn’t mean he’s won the election. He may have observed all the above rules, sure.

But we still don’t know if anyone actually bothered to tune in!

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Comments (23)