ACCEPT VERDICT OF VOTE

THE LIBERALS HAVE AT LEAST FOUR YEARS TO DECIDE WHAT THEY STAND FOR, IF ANYTHING

Kathleen Wynne wasn’t just defeated in Ontario’s election on Thursday. Ontario voters sentenced the soon-tobe-former premier to four years in re-education camp.

While losing 48 of the 55 seats her Liberals previously held, Wynne had the misfortune of retaining her own seat in Toronto. That means she faces the prospect of four years in an obscure corner of the legislature she once commanded, forced to watch as the Progressive Conservative government and New Democrat opposition do their best to dismantle her legacy.

Humbled, she won’t even enjoy the status accorded to an officially-recognized party. Her Liberals missed that bar by a single seat, and with it the money and privileges that goes with it. With just seven seats, Wynne and her six surviving colleagues will enjoy no more stature than the one-person Green party, which won its first-ever seat at the same time Wynne’s Liberals were haemorrhaging theirs.

She could quit, of course. She has already resigned as leader, and could give up her seat in Don Valley West as well. Former prime ministers Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Wynne’s Ontario predecessor, Dalton Mcguinty, all exited politics after giving up their leadership. But her position is a bit more ticklish than theirs. Winning her own seat was a personal victory; if she steps aside and a byelection is called, there is no guarantee the Liberals could hold it. A loss would reduce them to just six seats and further complicate their hopes Premier-designate Doug Ford will agree to accord them official status despite the rules, even though the Liberals refused the same accommodation to the NDP when Mcguinty became premier in 2003.

Mcguinty did eventually agree to some financial and procedural concessions for the NDP fragment, but they haven’t forgotten the incident and leader Andrea Horwath expressed no great eagerness to see Wynne offered any special treatment. “The people gave the Liberals seven seats, that’s what they have in the legislature and that’s what they’re going to have to deal with,” she said.

There is no love lost between the two parties. The NDP believes in principles, and thinks the Liberals have none. No small amount of the rancour dates from McGuinty’s 10 years as premier, when a belated effort to get a handle on the burgeoning debt put him in a direct confrontation with public sector unions, especially Ontario’s teachers. Union bosses continued to fume even after Mcguinty was gone and Wynne assiduously sought their friendship, pouring money and concessions into contracts, including lastminute extensions aimed at saving the Liberals from ugly labour episodes during the run-up to the election.

Losing power exacerbated that break. Organized labour spent millions to help defeat Conservatives over the Wynne and Mcguinty years, but found themselves being demonized in Wynne’s final desperate days, when she issued a much-mocked warning that an NDP government would be too beholden to the very same unions she had so fervently courted.

Winning back that support will be one of the many challenges the battered Liberals now face. Loss of party status means a loss of funding the party badly needs at a time they’ve depleted their resources on the failed campaign. They’ll be reduced to the equivalent of nonentities in the legislature, losing the chance to ask questions or participate in debates. That in turn would mean less face time with the public, which they’ll desperately need as they try to recover from the election defeat and rebuild support. And don’t count on the NDP, having achieved the stature of official opposition, to offer any assistance: more than anything, New Democrats will want to keep the Liberals down, the better to improve their own chances of one day replacing the Tories.

It seems unlikely the Liberals will disappear altogether, but there’s also no guarantee of a quick rebound. After losing to Harper’s Conservatives in 2006 it took the federal party nine years to recover, and only after they seized on the public popularity of Justin Trudeau. Until then, repeated efforts to redefine the party’s image and rework its platform made little headway, perhaps because Canadian Liberalism has always been a malleable substance, quick to claim whatever principles and beliefs seem most likely to lead them to power. They can be left-wing, right-wing or centrist, depending on the time, need and shifts in public attitudes.

Rarely do they stick to any one credo: Mcguinty famously offered a no-new-taxes pledge, then immediately broke it. Both Wynne and Mcguinty professed their determination to produce balanced budgets, while piling up repeated deficits. It was Mcguinty’s mid-campaign decision to cancel two power plants, at a cost of more than $1 billion, that started the slide to his departure two years later. Wynne promised better but her failure to jettison the cynical, self-serving Liberal ways underlay the disastrous loss of public trust that produced Thursday’s humiliation. That was never more evident than the moment she threw out her finance minister’s pledge of balanced budgets, in order to finance a slew of highpriced goodies as the election approached.

The party will now have four years to decide what it believes, if it believes anything at all. First it has to get its house in order, with a new leader and a plan to raise some cash. There are no obvious candidates to replace Wynne: although a number have been mentioned — Finance Minister Charles Sousa, former transportation minister Steven Del Duca — each carries the stigma of association with the ousted regime.

It may also be that party members come to share Ontario voters’ desire for change, and see little allure in continuing the legacy of a discredited past. That means accepting the voters’ verdict for what it was. Wynne supporters and the premier herself have been reluctant to acknowledge the depth of their repudiation, decrying Ontarians’ failure to appreciate their achievements, blaming it on misogyny or bigotry or backwardness.

“Not sorry” was the message of the premier’s final days. In her last election night speech she took the time to rattle off a collection of her greatest hits. An agitated supporter told a TV camera Ontarians lacked the vision needed for a “progressive” government like Wynne’s.

A good start to rebirth would be ditching the traditional Liberal admiration for themselves. Blaming voters for their defeat won’t get them anywhere. They lost because the public didn’t like what they were selling, or the people selling it. Once they absorb that, they can start figuring out who they want to be next.

BLAMING VOTERS FOR THEIR DEFEAT WON’T GET THEM ANYWHERE — KELLY MCPARLAND