The facts still matter in Ontario. Except . . .
Around the time Americans were improbably electing Donald Trump as their president last fall, a new catchphrase entered the lexicon of Ontario’s governing Liberals. “Facts still matter in Ontario.” Blindingly obvious as this truism may be, it speaks to the altered political landscape of the times that it managed to become a mantra at Queen’s Park.
Premier Kathleen Wynne, her ministers and MPPs enthusiastically repeat the slogan to fend off attacks on government policy in the Legislature from Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and other opposition members.
Whenever Brown gives a speech or does an interview, an annotated dissection of his comments — which the Liberals usually deride as “claims” — is distributed to journalists. These are collected on a website, factsstillmatter.ca, that categorizes them under the headings “flip flop,” “misrepresentation,” “big fib,” “false claim,” “old classic” and “award winners” — and tweeted from the account @OntarioFacts.
Wynne’s Liberals — in power since 2003 and facing a challenging re-election next June — hope to exploit Ontarians’ distaste for Trump by somehow linking Brown to the president with a penchant for prevarication.
That may be tricky given that the rookie Conservative leader has moved his party to the political centre by marching in the Pride parade, welcoming minorities and promising a “revenue-neutral” carbon tax.
His acknowledgement that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change and that human behaviour can and must change to reduce carbon pollution sounds reasonable to those who embrace science. But it has caused him trouble with right-wing groups such as Axe the Carbon Tax, which oppose such levies on ideological grounds.
Brown’s strategists are as mindful as their Liberal counterparts that in an era when emotion can trump reason, they have reason to be wary of getting Trumped.
They have no interest in being lumped in with fringe elements that could cause them trouble with the more reasonable majority.
It’s why the provincial Tories have distanced themselves from their federal counterparts on some issues that can be easily caricatured. A Liberal anti-Islamophobia motion modelled on the federal initiative that paralyzed and polarized the federal Conservatives last spring passed unanimously without controversy at Queen’s Park. In Ottawa, by contrast, the symbolic initiative was decried by some Conservatives as curbing freedom of expression or even the first step toward sharia law in Canada.
However, if Doug Ford, the bombastic brother of late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, ends up as a candidate for Brown’s party in Etobicoke North, that could undermine the youthful PC leader’s reasonable, centrist tack.
Ford, a one-term city councillor who finished second to Mayor John Tory in the 2014 Toronto election, has long tapped into voters’ gut feelings about complicated policy issues using homespun hyperbole.
Unapologetically anti-intellectual, he has skilfully used his family’s “Ford Nation” brand to keep his name in the news even as he criticizes the media for being out of touch with ordinary folks.
Lest anyone smugly think that Canadian politics is vastly superior to the raging dumpster fire south of the border, veteran Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant provides further proof that the Age of Unreason is alive and well here.
The MP for Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke has been airing videos on Facebook featuring her anchoring GNN — or Gal- lant Night News. Using some CNN-style features, it accuses the “elite-stream media” of broadcasting “fake news” to boost Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
Without providing any evidence, Gallant’s homemade “newscast” accuses the Star, CBC, CTV, Global, the Globe and Mail and “even the National Post” of colluding to run bogus stories on Ottawa’s $10.5-million legal settlement with child soldier-turned-Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr in exchange for Trudeau bailing out Canadian media companies.
“They’ve brought out fake news story after fake news story. They claim that it was all somehow (former Conservative prime minister Stephen) Harper’s fault,” the MP says.
“Just think how far outside of the mainstream that puts our media,” she intones, eerily echoing Trump’s rambling, unsubstantiated Twitter attacks on the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC and other major news outlets.
It has long been fashionable on the right to bemoan “the Media Party” with dark warnings of a liberal groupthink in Canada’s major news organizations — even though about three-quarters of the country’s newspapers endorsed Harper’s Tories in the 2015 federal election.
Yet even the press’s most hysterical, conspiracy-minded critics tended to shy away from suggesting journalists produced “fake news.”
Until, that is, Trump’s Twitter-fuelled triumph stateside with his whiny predawn social media screeds against “the failing New York Times” and the “Amazon Washington Post.”
While Gallant’s Trumpian rhetoric is cringe-worthy to many politicians who want to get elected these days, the federal Conservatives’ recent leadership race is a reminder that appealing to the better an- gels of human nature isn’t the only way to gain traction.
MP Kellie Leitch ultimately finished sixth on May 27 — far behind more moderate winner Andrew Scheer — but she defined the contest for months by tapping into the Age of Unreason.
Leitch, a brilliant pediatric orthopedic surgeon in the Order of Ontario, with a PhD and an MBA, appeared on Fox Business News to rail against the “elites” and “insiders” and “the left-wing media.”
Her controversial pledge to screen new immigrants for “Canadian values” dominated much of the discourse on the Conservative contest, landing her on the cover of Maclean’s magazine brandishing a Maple Leaf flag on a broom handle with the headline “Are You Canadian Enough?”
Even though critics viewed her promise as a “dog whistle” to appeal to voters prejudiced against Muslims, Tory and Liberal insiders admit to being troubled by how much it appeared to resonate in some quarters.
As flawed a candidate as she was with a divisive message and poor communication skills, Leitch was one of the top fundraisers in the race. Her attention-seeking campaign brought in enough cash to buy ads on U.S. website, Breitbart News, an alt-right outlet widely criticized for its sycophantic coverage of Trump.
The Simcoe-Grey MP’s defeat, therefore, was seen as something of a triumph of reason over emotion.
Indeed, many Conservatives breathed a sigh of relief at Scheer’s victory because they didn’t want to hand their political rivals a piñata full of easy pickings.
The fact of the matter is that, in Canada at least, mainstream political parties still believe the best way to win votes is to win minds as well as hearts.