Liberals close to making smart call?
Ontario’s next election will be held June 7, 2018, the Liberal government says. Don’t bet on it.
The Liberals have been delivering a flood of election promises that is even more torrential than Ontario’s spring rains. The sheer volume is unusual a year before an election. So are some of the promises.
The one that stands out is a “plan” for a $21-billion high-speed train that would run from Toronto to Windsor. It’s never going to happen, but when a party resuscitates that old idea, it has truly scraped the gunk from the bottom of the election promises barrel.
Tuesday, Premier Kathleen Wynne had her promise machine out again, vowing to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and give workers longer holidays.
Wynne has been touring the province making promises that include free college and university tuition, pharmacare for those under 25, a 25-per-cent reduction in electricity bills, more money for hospitals, more child care, rent control, a basic income plan and Ontario Municipal Board reform.
There has to be a reason for this early onslaught of promises, and there are two theories. The first is that Wynne is desperately trying to get the poll numbers up so that she doesn’t get booted out by her own party. If so, the strategy might be working. A poll earlier this month by Campaign Research shows the Liberals ahead with 37 per cent support, followed by the PCs at 33 and the NDP at 22. The margin of error for the online poll is plus or minus four per cent. Polling from the same company shows the pharmacare and basic income plans are pushing up Liberal numbers.
The second possibility is that the Liberals intend to call the election for late August or early September of this year. Strategically, this would
While the Liberals have been wooing voters with lovable promises, PCs haven’t given voters a single reason to support them.
be smart, and if there is one thing the Ontario Liberal party is good at, it’s election strategy.
Rationally, one could argue that the promised spending orgy from a party that has taken a decade to balance the budget is like celebrating one’s first week of sobriety with a pub crawl, but rationality doesn’t have much to do with Ontario politics.
The bottom line is that Liberal candidates have plenty of attractive-sounding free stuff to talk about at the door. The bill will come some other time and history suggests Ontarians don’t much care.
A late August election would also get the vote over before two separate trials involving senior Liberal staffers. Those begin in early September and are unlikely to produce any good news for the Liberals.
Wynne also has the chance to catch the Progressive Conservatives unprepared. The party says it will be ready if a quick vote is called, but it has no platform and only about half of its candidates are nominated. Its policy process has been glacial and is to culminate in a convention in late November.
While the Liberals have been wooing voters with lovable promises, PCs haven’t given voters a single reason to support them, other than not being the Liberals. PC Leader Patrick Brown likes to talk about high hydro rates, the economy and red tape but the only policy he is really known for is a carbon tax, something his own supporters really, really hate.
Voters not only don’t know what Brown stands for, they don’t know who he is. A Forum Research poll earlier this month indicated that 54 per cent of those polled don’t know enough about Brown to offer an opinion on how he’s doing.
The Ontario Liberals have not governed well and people still don’t like their leader, but that hasn’t held them back in past elections. The Liberals are skilled campaigners and have a gift for promising a magical future.
In fact, they are already campaigning on just such a plan while the PCs spend all their energy on nomination controversies. The election might be a lot sooner than most think.