Mostly, Tories have A ‘mandate’ to not be the liberals
Can Ford afford to reject $10B in carbon taxes?
There is a tendency after every election to over-read the results. We are particularly prone to this in my trade, invested as we are in the significance of every falling leaf.
So the replacement of one government with another in Ontario, Doug Ford’s Conservatives taking over from Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals, has been greeted with headlines to the effect that Ontario had overnight been transformed into “Ford Nation.” In Ottawa, Conservative MPs were on their feet in the House claiming the results meant Ontarians had “rejected” the federal carbon tax, along with the rest of what their leader, Andrew Scheer, called “Justin Trudeau’s damaging policies.” There is much talk of the sweeping mandate Ford has been given.
So let’s just take a minute, shall we, and get real? Over four previous elections, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives averaged roughly 33 per cent of the popular vote, enough for between 24 and 37 seats. The difference between those abysmal failures and Thursday night’s 76-seat triumph was seven percentage points: it is only the funhouse mirrors of the “first past the post” electoral system that converts 40 per cent of the vote into 60 per cent of the seats.
That’s how our system works, of course — for now — and the Conservatives have the same right to govern as every previous “majority” government elected with a minority of the vote.
But we needn’t dress it up as more than what it was.
Mandate? Forty per cent of the vote went to the Conservatives, and whatever it was they were running on: the party did not release anything resembling a platform until the last days of the campaign, which left the closest readers puzzled as to just how much the party would spend, or tax, or borrow, and where if at all it would find the “efficiencies” the leader promised. But fine: let’s say those 40 per cent supported the Conservative “agenda.”
Meanwhile, roughly 60 per cent supported the parties to their left, and their agenda of pricing carbon, “borrowing billions from future generations” and all the rest of the things Ontarians were supposed to have rejected (much of which Ford also promised). Again, the Tories have the right to govern, and the power to implement whatever it turns out they believe in. But let us not have too much loose talk of a mandate. Mostly, they have a mandate to not be the Liberals.
That is what really happened in this election. There wasn’t any great wave of enthusiasm for the Conservatives, still less their leader; they won in spite of, not because of him. What there was, among a significant part of the population, was a determination to be rid of the Grits, after 15 long years of sleaze, waste and nannystatism.
That determination has been evident for some time. The Conservatives may have ended the campaign with a seven-point margin of victory, but they started it with a lead of 10 points, having led by as much as 18 points for the past three years. The result, in short, was pretty much baked in from the start. The only question was whether Ford would deter enough people from voting Tory to save the Liberals from their fate. As it turned out, the answer was no: as a very wise friend puts it, when the people have decided to “throw the bums out,” it almost doesn’t matter what the other bums look like.
That’s not to say the campaign was irrelevant. The Tories had a scare thrown into them mid-campaign, when the surging NDP briefly led the polls. And the Liberals, unpopular as they were going into the campaign, saw their support drop throughout: the NDP surge persuaded a second wave of voters to defect to the NDP, as the best hope of keeping the Tories from getting into power.
The combined effect was a disaster for the Grits: at 19.6 per cent of the popular vote, this is the Liberals’ worst performance in Ontario in any election, federal or provincial, in the history of the country. For their federal cousins, this must be sobering. Remember that, before the star power of Justin Trudeau revived the party’s fortunes, the federal Liberals had just turned in the worst performance in their history, in Ontario and across the country. The Liberal brand is powerful and enduring. But it is not immortal.
Ford, meanwhile, has the potential to cause the federal government much heartache. Whether or not Ontarians intended to reject the carbon tax, he now has the power to fight it; certainly his opposition did not appear to harm his chances, which will embolden critics elsewhere. With Ontario and Saskatchewan now flatly opposed, possibly soon to be joined by Alberta, it would not be surprising to see other provinces wavering.
How, then, will the federal Liberals respond? Suppose Ford makes good on his vow to scrap the province’s cap-and-trade system, and to fight any federal tax. Will Trudeau really impose one over the province’s opposition, with a federal election just 16 months away?
On the other hand, Ontario is broke, as Ford will soon discover. (Expect the usual “cupboard is bare” routine after the new government has had a chance to look at the books.) Among the other extravagant campaign promises he will soon be forced to abandon, is it so impossible to imagine that he would reluctantly come to terms with the federal carbon tax — especially if he gets to keep all the revenues? Is he really going to turn up his nose at billions of dollars a year, from a tax collected for him by another level of government?