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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Enjoy your stay in Hell, Jim.

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…with those most likely to vote. Holy shit la merde!

They’ve got a huge sample – two thousand people. And look at what’s happened to the NDP vote! If this is a trend, and not a blip, who is going to be leader of the Opposition?

And, continuing with the breathless questions, what does it all mean, Virginia? It means GOTV tomorrow determines who wins. Full stop.

Ipsos, with my emphasis added:

“Examining the regional vote by those most likely to vote:

· In the 905, the PCs (43%) pull ahead of the Liberals (30%) and NDP (23%).

· In the 416, the NDP (38%) are in a statistical tie with the Liberals (35%),while the Tories (24%) trail.

· In Southwestern Ontario, the NDP (39%) are also ahead of the PCs (32%) and Liberals (25%).

· In Eastern Ontario, the Tories (43%) do well against the Liberals (29%) and NDP (24%).

· In Central Ontario (based on a small sample size), the PCs (45%) pull ahead of the Liberals (35%) and NDP (17%).

· In Northern Ontario, the results (based on a small sample size), the PCs (37%), Liberals (34%) and NDP (28%) remain competitive.”

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Good morning, Ontario! This rainy morn, we have two Ekos and Forum meteorological predictions wreaking havoc with PC governing plans – but, remember, Forum and Ekos have previously promised one thing, and decidedly done another. Ipsos is rolling into our area at 6 p.m. tonight, and they tend to be more accurate that the other weather-predicting folks.

The Forum and Ekos prognostications – along with the actual weather, which looks super-crummy (and even scary) today and tomorrow – may have the unhelpful effect of persuading progressives they don’t need to leave the comfort of their couches.  Conservative voters, meanwhile, have a long-standing, well-documented tendency to come out in all kinds of weather.

Get ready for a crazy 48 hours, Ontario! The weather folks may be saying one thing – but the people on the ground may have other plans!

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I am not so much a cat person. But I could watch this 6,000 times. And, in fact, I have.

The expression on his little furry face! What genius.

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In a tight election race, like this one, you have to pay attention to the little things. It’s the little things that will kill you. Case in point: the Liberal government’s headlong rush to cram casino operations in every single corner of the province.

I’m amazed the Liberals have let this issue fester; I’m surprised, too, that the PCs and New Democrats haven’t been all over it. Out in the hinterland, folks are unhappy.

The party that wins this one is the party that says “enough is enough.”

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I’m not sure why I titled this post in that way.  I like rhymes and alliterations, as you know.

Anyway.  Yesterday’s post on GOTV caught the retweeting attention of no less than Keith Levene, formerly of the Clash and Public Image Ltd.  Here is the proof:

Which gives me a shameless excuse to post this.  (Interesting fact: the guy on the drums, Jim Walker, supplied beats at a single get-together of my first punk outfit, the Social Blemishes, before he hooked up with Johnny Rotten in the U.K. in 1978.)

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1. Ontario New Democrats: Money. Effect: They disappeared in Week One, and only reappeared at the debate, at which point it was too late.

2. Ontario Liberals: A coherent message. Effect: Nobody knows what they stand for, apart from being against the other parties (unless someone wants to have a coalition with them, that is).

3. Ontario Progressive Conservatives: A calculator. Effect: Their ‘Million Jobs Plan’ didn’t add up, and their pledge to create jobs while simultaneously killing jobs made no sense, either.

Net effect of all of the above: Turnout in the advance polls is down dramatically – nearly 40,000 less than 2011 – and it’ll be even worse on Thursday.  I still think that works to Hudak’s advantage – conservative partisans number less, but can always be counted upon to get out and vote (viz., Harper 2006, 2008, 2011) – but we shall see.

In the main, it has been the most soul-destroying campaign I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s saying something.  It’s been awful.

And what’s worse is this: we’ll back at it before you know it.  Nobody is going to win a majority. The downward spiral will continue.

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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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