Can’t they all lose?
Province will continue to sink into debt
The long and the short of it is that whichever party wins, the province will continue to sink into the mire of debt and overregulation in which the departing Liberals have left it.
This election was said from the outset to be the Ontario Conservatives’ to lose, and let the record show they did their level best to lose it. No matter how it turns out, no one can take that away from them.
To give up a 17-point lead in a four-week campaign takes discipline and hard work. Not many parties manage it; it requires just the right combination of dodgy ethics, incoherent platform, empty campaign and, most important, a shambling train wreck of a leader, whose least objectionable quality is that he was allegedly a big-time drug dealer in his youth.
Sure, they got a little lucky, with their previous leader having been forced out over a range of sins ranging from allegedly unwanted sexual advances on teenage employees to an undisclosed loan from a prospective candidate. But to end the campaign with a quarter of their candidates facing lawsuits, elections law complaints or police investigation, for everything from identity theft to uttering threats — that’s not luck, that’s talent.
But then, the Tories had worthy competitors.
For every Conservative candidate making jokes about gays or Muslims, there was an NDP candidate quoting Hitler or a Liberal candidate asking whether 9/11 was an inside job. The tie was broken only in the campaign’s final week, when Tory candidate Raymond Cho apologized for getting into a fight with a Grade 7 student while canvassing on school grounds.
The same was true of the leaders. While Conservative Leader Doug Ford stumbled through the televised debates and proved incapable of answering basic questions about his platform or even how a bill becomes a law, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath offered persuasive evidence of being unable to read a budget, signing off on a platform that listed a “reserve” as revenue rather than spending.
Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, in perhaps the campaign’s most eccentric gambit, conceded the election with five days to go, on the theory that people would be more likely to vote Liberal if they were convinced there was no danger of them actually being elected. She was careful, however, not to make any commitment about her own leadership, leaving that to candidates like David Henderson, who responded by announcing his campaign to replace her.
In the end the election came down, as most do, to whom the voters hated and feared most. Vote NDP, Horwath’s team exhorted, to stop Ford. Vote Conservative, Team Tory replied, to stop the NDP. Vote Liberal, Wynne pleaded, to stop both the Tories and the NDP, which is to say to give the balance of power to the party the voters had just put out of power.
Each of the three parties could make a credible claim to being more unfit to govern than the others.
For the Liberals, it is their record in office, a dazzling 15-year string of broken promises, ethics scandals, spending boondoggles and massive increases in the provincial debt.
For the NDP, it is a combination of the manifest unreadiness of much of their caucus and the vast overreach of their platform, whose abiding principle seems to be that the Liberals, who set new records for spending, taxing, borrowing and regulating, had not gone nearly far enough.
It’s easy to say the problem with the Tories is Ford: a blustering know-nothing with no discernible beliefs but a pronounced taste for havoc, the highlights of whose years in Toronto city politics were his attacks on the chief of police for investigating his brother, the mayor, and a finding by the city’s integrity commissioner that he had improperly intervened, as a councillor, on behalf of two clients of his family’s label-printing company.
But it was the Conservatives who elected him leader. A party that knowingly chooses a candidate with his kind of baggage, with at least one other qualified and presentable candidate available, is as much the problem as its leader.
The long and the short of it is that whichever party wins, the province will continue to sink into the mire of debt and overregulation in which the departing Liberals have left it. The whole of the campaign was conducted in a weird twilight glow of denial, all of the parties hysterically rolling out one new spending program after another for all the world as if they had the first clue how to pay for them.
That is not to say the platforms were identical. The Liberals, having abandoned even the pretence of balancing the books in their last budget, propose to increase spending by $22 billion, or 17 per cent, over the next four years.
The Tories, so far as anyone can tell — they have not spelled out how, or even what baseline by which they are measuring cuts or increases — would hold it to a mere $17 billion more, while the NDP would go all the way to $27 billion. (I am indebted to economist Mike Moffatt for this reconstruction of the figures.)
The Tories, on the other hand, would cut taxes sharply, while the Liberals would leave them where they are and the NDP would raise them. Result: all three parties would add tens of billions to the province’s debt, already among the highest in the country relative to GDP, nine years into a recovery. God help us all if there’s a recession.
Henry Kissinger, asked which side he preferred in the Iraq-Iran war, is said to have replied: “Can’t they both lose?” If only that option were available to Ontarians.