Provincial cage fight already underway
You’d never guess dropping of election writ is still weeks away
The female voice is confidential and concerned, the background music foreboding enough to have played in the dystopian movie “Blade Runner 2049.”
“There’s the Doug Ford you think you know,” she intones.
“And the Doug Ford who’ll fire 40,000 people including teachers and nurses. The real Doug Ford. If you don’t recognize his Ontario, you’re not alone.”
That’s one in a series of “Real Doug Ford” ads targeting the new leader of the Progressive Conservatives for which the governing Liberals have reportedly paid $1 million.
Taken as a whole, they’re hilariously melodramatic and as shamelessly slanted as all partisan advertisements invariably are.
(For what it’s worth, Ford himself claims the word “cuts” is not in his vocabulary and that he believes in driving efficiencies not laying people off, or so he said at a rally in Hamilton earlier this month.)
The Tories argue the ads are a desperate attempt to demonize Ford by a floundering party on its last legs.
The Liberals maintain they’re not desperate, they’re just in election mode.
The point is, the writ for the June 7 election hasn’t even been dropped yet and already the people of Ontario are being bombarded with propaganda and platitudes from all sides.
For the record, though the writ launching the official campaign period can’t be issued later than May 9, provincial law gives Premier Kathleen Wynne the leeway to trigger the election from May 3 onward.
But whenever it lands, clearly voters will already be satiated, if not downright nauseated, by all the verbal roundhouses and fat lips that make democratic elections as classy as your average cage fight.
Here’s a small taste of the growing onslaught of kicks and punches that have crossed my desk in the last couple of days.
In a PC release Ford said he’d hire an outside auditor to probe how the Liberals have misspent taxpayer dollars and that if Wynne tried to pull these kinds of “shady tricks” in private life, there’d be a few more Liberals joining David Livingstone in jail.
Livingston is, of course, the aide to former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty recently sentenced to four months in jail for his part in the gas plant scandal.
Quickly rising up from the mat, the Liberals countered by releasing the entire transcript of Wynne’s statement denouncing Ford’s “ugly, vicious brand of politics that traffics in smears and lies.”
Wynne compared Ford to Donald Trump, equating his jail comments to Trump supporters chanting “lock her up,” a reference to Trump’s presidential campaign against opponent Hillary Clinton.
Well, naturally the Tories weren’t going to stand for that cheap shot, even though some people have been throwing it ever since Ford won the PC leadership race.
“The campaign hasn’t even started yet and Kathleen Wynne is already desperately trying to scare people with negative attacks,” Tory MPP Lisa MacLeod scoffed in a news release.
She added that Wynne is “trying to run an election campaign against a different candidate in a different country because she can’t defend her record in Ontario.”
Not to be outdone, the New Democrats entered the fray with a freestyling release from health care critic MPP France Gelinas which blamed Wynne for creating a “dangerous crisis” with long wait times in overcrowded hospitals.
Moving in on Wynne’s rhetoric about Trump, Gelinas said Ontarians know only NDP leader Andrea Horwath can stop Ford, whose “cuts” and “layoffs” are bound to make things even worse.
Within the same hour, the Green Party sent out is own release. Rather than flinging low blows or indulging in name calling, it criticized the Liberals for throwing millions of dollars at nuclear power renovation projects instead of going whole hog after Hydro-Quebec water power.
Although refreshing in its earnestness, I wasn’t sure if the Greens had somehow missed the boat or were simply sticking to leader Mike Schreiner’s mantra of doing politics differently.
Upon reflection, I suspect the latter.
The people of Ontario are being bombarded with propaganda and platitudes from all sides.
Andrew Dreschel’s commentary appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. adreschel@thespec.com @AndrewDreschel 905-526-3495