187 Search Results for wynne
Wynne: “There’s no new money”
Because, well, there isn’t. And Wynne’s smart to say so, early on in the new mandate. She has no choice, in fact.
Some people (eg. Smokey Thomas) are professing shock about this, but they shouldn’t be. It’s the reality. As I wrote last week, tough decision-making is part of the job. That’s what she’s doing, looks like.
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Kathleen Wynne: “I question the judgment of Mr. Tory”
And:
“I am willing to debate John Tory any time, anywhere, and twice on Sundays,” said Wynne. “I’m disappointed he has chosen to hide instead of tackling the issues that matter to voters.”
Just poking around on the Internet this morning, and found this release. May mean little in the current context, but it’s sure interesting.
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Carol Goar: why won’t Wynne government help the victims of institutional abuse?
A must-read:
The province has silenced them for half a century. But their day of reckoning will come — no matter how many legal roadblocks the government erects.
Abused institutional survivors to Kathleen Wynne: a year later, nothing
Full disclosure: I work with the abused survivors of a number of Ontario institutions. A year ago this week, they met with Kathleen Wynne, who promised to help them. A few months later, they followed up with a letter – and got nothing back.
This isn’t just another case of government being insensitive – it’s in fact outrageous. And these people – who were herded into these province-run institutions when they were children, and routinely beaten and sexually abused – deserve far better from a government that, even now, still refuses to acknowledge it owed them a duty of care.
More to come on this. For now, their presss release, just out:
Did Premier Kathleen Wynne Break Her Promise to Abused Institutional Survivors?
Before she was Premier, Wynne said she would help but now that she is Premier, the victims are ignored
TORONTO, May 31, 2013 /CNW/ – Survivors of the Huronia Regional Centre (HRC) have followed up on yesterday’s dramatic Queen’s Park press conference, demanding to know why – after a full year – Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has yet to make good on a personal promise she made to address the horrific abuse they suffered.
Patricia Seth and Marie Slark, plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against HRC and the province of Ontario, met with Wynne at a Truth and Reconciliation gathering in Toronto – exactly a year ago this week – and told her about the abuse they endured by those entrusted to care for and protect them. Patricia and Marie were impressed with the attention the Premier paid to their plight. “She really seemed to care about us,” recalls Marie of the meeting. Patricia added, “Kathleen looked us right in the eye and said she would help us. But she hasn’t. Nothing has happened and we never heard from her again. Justice seems so far away.”
The institutional survivors followed up on their meeting with Wynne. In January 2013, Patricia and Marie wrote to the then-Minister during the Ontario Liberal leadership race, imploring Wynne to help them and all the other victims receive justice in a fair and timely manner. “She never really responded to that,” said Patricia.
The Star on the OLP leadership: Pupatello “smart, feisty,” Wynne “favourite of the left-wing downtown Toronto crowd”
A must-read, as they say.
My latest: it’s not your party, you can’t recruit who you want to
What happens when a political party loses its mind?
It can happen. It has happened. Often.
The Conservative Party produces ads mocking the facial deformity of Jean Chretien, and gets reduced to two seats. The Liberal Party selects a leader who hasn’t lived in Canada in decades, and gets reduced to third place, for the first time in its history.
The leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party sides with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, and is pilloried internationally. The B.C. New Democrats run fake charities to funnel money to themselves, and end up on the receiving end of criminal prosecution.
And now, the once-mighty Ontario Liberal Party wants to recruit a new leader.
From another political party.
Unless you’re a political junkie with a lot of spare time on your hands, it’s possible you haven’t heard about this profoundly, deeply stupid stunt. Nobody really pays attention anymore to the once-mighty Ontario Liberal Party, after all. Not even in Ontario.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is part of the reason. He’s won two majorities in a row because he’s shrewdly captured a sizable chunk of the Liberal voter base — both federal and provincial.
But another part of the reason why you, we, don’t care about the Ontario Liberals — why they lost party status under Kathleen Wynne, and repeated that pathetic result with Steven Del Duca — is easy to ascertain.
They did it to themselves.
Their open letter to Mike Schreiner, the current leader of the Ontario Green Party, is a prime example of the idiocy that now grips the party of former leaders.
David Peterson and Dalton McGuinty: neither of those two men, who were proven winners, would ever countenance what various party big names have done – praise another party, and diminish their own.
The letter was sent even after Schreiner had said no. It was signed by myriad Wynne-era luminaries like Deb Matthews, Greg Sorbara and Peter Donolo. Wrote these political geniuses: “We are taking this unprecedented step — to reach outside our ranks to urge you, the leader of another party — to join the Ontario Liberals and run for our party’s leadership.”
Their arrogance, their conceit, is revealed in that single word: “our.”
Speaking only for myself — not as the chairman of the Ontario Liberal War Room in 2003, 2007 and 2011, even though I was — I say: How dare you! How dare you say, implicitly or explicitly, that the Ontario Liberal Party is “yours.” Because it isn’t.
Forget about the fact that you have now dramatically improved the fortunes of the provincial Greens, and seriously damaged the provincial Liberals. Forget about the fact that floor-crossings almost never work, because voters rightly regard them as the product of dirty backroom deals.
Forget about the fact that you have diminished the many contributions of the real Ontario Liberals seeking the party’s leadership, a couple of whom are actual elected members of the provincial Legislature.
Forget about the fact that Schreiner is now delaying any kind of a response, likely to maximize his party’s fortunes, and maximize the Ontario Liberals’ pain. Forget about all of that.
No, what is really offensive is your arrogance. That you somehow know better than the thousands of card-carrying Ontario Liberals who work hard, who volunteer, and who have never received a cabinet post or a fat contract. That it is “your” party.
Will Mike Schreiner take you up on your offer? He’d be insane to do so. But either way, one result is inevitable.
A third majority term for Doug Ford.
— Kinsella has been the leader of winning war rooms for Jean Chretien and Dalton McGuinty.
My latest: by-elections don’t matter, except when they do
Do by-elections, which usually have notoriously low turnout, matter?
We get told general campaigns do, all the time. But what about by-elections? Should we care — and should we care that no one seems to, you know, care about them?
That legendary political muse, Dan Quayle, had the best take on it all. Said the former U.S. vice-president: “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.”
Well, yes. Hard to quibble with that one. Good insight, Dan.
Fewer folks went to the polls in this weeks by-election in Mississauga Lakeshore — only around 30%. But, before some political scientist starts writing wordy op-eds about the need for compulsory voting, remember: by-elections are beloved by hacks and flaks, but rarely ever regular folks. And they’re the bosses.
For instance: Toronto Centre had a byelection in October 2020. More than 80,000 people were entitled to vote. Slightly over 16,000 did. York Centre had a byelection in the same month, with about the same result: more than 70,000 were eligible to cast a ballot. Only 11,000 bothered. Democracy survived.
So, before academia gets its tenured knickers in a knot, remember: by-elections don’t ever attract as much attention ruin as general elections do. That’s normal. And it’s unlikely to change.
Mississauga-Lakeshore therefore had the standard byelection turnout, but a notable result. The result tells us a few things, participation rate notwithstanding. Here they are.
One, the Conservative Party got clobbered. The Liberal candidate — a former Kathleen Wynne government minister, and therefore not without blemish — basically massacred his Tory opponent, by thousands of votes. He took 51% to the Conservative’s 37%.
That’s notable, as noted, because that’s a worse showing than what the much-derided Erin O’Toole got when he was running things. In that race, O’Toole’s chosen candidate did better than Pierre Poilievre’s.
Wasn’t Poilievre supposed to sweep the ‘burbs and all that? Wasn’t he supposed to be the thing that cured all that ailed Team Tory?
Well, Pierre has represented an Ottawa suburb for years, winning in seven elections. But he didn’t in Mississauga-Lakeshore. How come?
His spinners, all coincidentally anonymous, insist it was because the aforementioned riding is all-Liberal, all the time.
Well, no. That’s false. Sure, Liberal Svend Spengemann represented the riding in the Trudeau era — but before that, Mississauga-Lakeshore was federal Conservative territory for a number of years.
And, oh yes, this: provincially, the riding is still Conservative territory. Just a few months ago, in June, a provincial Conservative candidate won there — by many thousands of votes. And four years before that, same result: the Tories won it, by a lot.
So, that’s all you need to know about the excuse that Mississauga-Lakeshore is a Liberal fortress and Conservatives will never win there: it’s an excuse. It’s bollocks, in fact.
What about Team Poilievre’s other excuse — duly reprinted, without attribution in the pages of the Toronto Star, because it serves both their interests — that it’s all Doug Ford’s fault? You know, that the Ontario Premier sank his federal cousins in the by-election because he’s unpopular? Guilt by association and all that.
Except, that one doesn’t wash either. When he’s been running things, in good times and bad, Ford has taken that riding handily. Twice.
Did Ford’s misadventure with the notwithstanding clause, and the general strike it would have caused, hurt Poilievre’s chances?
Again, no. Ford ultimately never used the notwithstanding clause to win a fight with an education union — and there was no general strike, either. And, besides: both those things were controversies many weeks before the by-election even got underway.
So, what was it? Who is to blame for the first real-world test of Pierre Poilievre’s leadership since he became leader?
Well, that would be what Poilievre and his caucus see in the bathroom mirror every morning: themselves. The convoy crap, the crypto-currency craziness, the whackadoodle WEF weirdos. All of that, and more, has persuaded many Canadians that, under Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party of Canada has abandoned the political center. And is, you know, chasing the People’s Party vote.
Which, by the by, got 286 votes in Mississauga-Lakeshore.
About which, our muse Dan Quayle might say: “Not winning enough of the popular vote? It means you are not popular.”
About Michael Coteau
We’ve been friends for a long time, and I think he can be Premier one day. (I also think only a total fool would count out Doug Ford, too, but that’s a post for another day.)
Why Coteau?
• he isn’t associated with any of the Wynne government scandals
• he’s smart, principled and from a new generation of political leaders
• he was one of the few who got himself re-elected despite the massive Ford win in 2018
• he hasn’t surrounded himself with Wynne-era backroomers
• he isn’t the prisoner of special interests
• he doesn’t just oppose for the sake of opposing – he’s got plenty of ideas
The PCs I know take Coteau seriously.
His opponents, they don’t.
Dimples? Simple
Dimples.
That’s what you actually get some Trudeau trolls nattering about online: Andrew Scheer’s dimples.
Seriously.
For some reason beyond the understanding of sane people, the Trudeaupian types think that the Conservative leader’s dimples disqualify him as a candidate for Prime Minister. They go on about it all the time.
The same criticism used to be made about Bill Clinton. The Democratic president’s many Republican antagonists would say that Clinton’s ever-present grin was unsettling. They would say that Clinton seems to be smiling when, you know, he shouldn’t be.
In recent months, the upward tilt of Andrew Scheer’s lips haven’t been as evident. We don’t know if he’s received advice to look less happy, or if he is simply distressed by the state of Confederation. Either way, Andrew Scheer is not smirking nearly as much as he used to.
This tendency of some people to attack politicians for something over which they have no control – to wit, their physical appearance – is nothing really new.
Haters on the left attacked Doug Ford for his weight, just as they did with his deceased brother, Toronto Mayor Rob. Kathleen Wynne was mocked for resembling the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live.
And, as Wynne would certainly know, female politicians are regularly attacked – viciously, ceaselessly, unfairly – for their appearance: their hairstyle, their style of dress, their relative attractiveness. All the time.
Such attacks can change the course of political history. The infamous 1993 Conservative Party ad that pointed out the facial paralysis of my former boss, Jean Chretien, is the most infamous example. On the night those ads hit the airwaves in the midst of the 1993 federal election campaign, this writer was running Chretien’s war room at his Ottawa headquarters.
We did not know those attack ads were coming, and we were shocked when they did. Unidentified voices could be heard asking if the Liberal leader “looked like a Prime Minister.“
My boss had been waiting his whole life for that attack. He responded a few hours later, at a campaign stop in New Brunswick. He pointed out that “this was the face” that God gave him, and – unlike Tories, he said – “I don’t speak out of both sides of my mouth.“
Boom. Tories reduced to two seats.
In political back rooms, however, a great deal of time is still devoted to discussing and debating the physiology of political candidates. Example: prior to this writer arriving in British Columbia in 1996 to assist the BC Liberal campaign, some nameless genius strategist decided to stick BC liberal leader Gordon Campbell in a plaid shirt, so he would look a little more proletarian, and a little less house street.
The gambit backfired dramatically. Campbell was ridiculed for trying to be something that he was not.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau presents a political anomaly. Trudeau, like Gordon Campbell, is a handsome fellow. Even Rolling Stone gushed in a cover story that Trudeau and his family are “photogenic” and “glamorous.”
In Canada, the politicians who tend to succeed are unlike Trudeau. They are the ones who possess the hockey-rink-and-Timmmies Everyman look. Ralph Klein, Rene Levesque, Mel Lastman, Jean Chretien and Rob Ford were frequently attacked by the elites for being dishevelled or, at least, somewhat less than a Hollywood matinee idol.
But voters, clearly, loved them for it. Because, in the main, not too many voters resemble Hollywood matinee idols either.
If they’ve gotten this far, serious students of policy will be offended by all this talk about physical appearance.
They’re right. We shouldn’t make important decisions based on looks.
But, not long after he lost the aforementioned 1996 BC election, Gordon Campbell ruefully remarked to this writer: “It’s 70 per cent how you look, 20 per cent how you say it, and only 10 per cent what you say.”
Campbell knows whereof he speaks. And, if you don’t believe me, go looking for Andrew Scheer’s dimples.
They’re gone.