Wynne wades into hostile town-hall territory
Coming soon to a town near you: a town hall with your premier.
Kathleen Wynne has taken her campaign trail road show on tour — six months early. By next May the campaign will be underway for Ontario’s June 7 election, but Wynne isn’t waiting.
Peppered with tough questions when she walked into a Brampton community centre this week and a Toronto concert hall last month, she never got a lob ball.
Why submit herself to a public grilling when the feedback is so relentlessly negative? Risk-averse strategists normally shield unpopular politicians from such uncontrolled encounters.
Applause was polite at best. People didn’t show her much love, but they didn’t manifest much hate, either.
Wynne cut through the negativity with some deft responses, and got grudging acknowledgement of her willingness to meet people face-toface without ducking.
“I really want to congratulate you for being so brave to be here,” one questioner said from a floor microphone.
The Toronto and Brampton events are an early preview of the province- wide tour coming in the new year. A seemingly laudable exercise in democratic accountability, it comes with a catch, because it’s bankrolled by taxpayers on the eve of an election.
Normally, the nominal costs of renting a hall and speaker system would be a quibble — a small price to pay for the payoff of putting a premier on the hot seat. But it’s awfully late in the election season to be sending Wynne on tour at public expense (it’s not as if the government is offering the opposition leaders equal time).
But these all-expenses-paid town halls also come at a political cost to the Liberals. By convening them under government auspices, Wynne’s handlers have relinquished whatever influence they’d otherwise wield over who gets in, who gets to ask questions and who gets to clap — or sit on their hands.
Town halls traditionally are underwritten by political parties, the audience is personally invited and their questions screened. In the last federal election, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives turned their tightly controlled events into parodies of partisanship, and former Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak spoke to mostly loyalists.
By contrast, Wynne’s encounters are open to anyone of any political persuasion, and facing the unknown in unscripted settings is never a slam dunk for any sitting premier. Unlike the predictability of press conferences, a public town hall is more like going door to door, where voters talk in more personal terms about how government has let them down (one man described how shoddy medical treatment led to a preventable amputation of “a chunk of my foot”).
There were recurring questions about rising auto insurance rates, hospital overcrowding, child-care shortages, growing government debt, a painful colleges strike, Hydro One privatization and cannabis sales (the Beer Store being ancient history). Wynne showed empathy, never losing her cool even when it got heated.
The premier’s recurring pitch is that much of what ails the province can be remedied with a suite of new Liberal policies — Pharmacare for children and young adults, a $15 minimum wage and improved transit. She seems at ease amid the give and take, noting the irony of role reversal — she used to ask the tough questions as an education activist before entering politics. For all the audience ambivalence, there was no palpable hostility or antipathy. Interestingly, Wynne won rare applause after explaining to a questioner why she’s suing PC Leader Patrick Brown (he refuses to retract an erroneous statement claiming she was “a sitting premier sitting in trial” in a Sudbury byelection case that was thrown out of court).
Despite the downside, the upside is that these town halls are akin to training camp for a premier about to hit the campaign trail.
Yet no matter how agile her responses — and many were nimble in the circumstances — some questions are difficult to answer (and some misdeeds hard to answer for) when your party is coming up on 15 years in power. Which raises the question of who can credibly and persuasively provide the answers that voters seek.
For all the doubts about Wynne’s re-election prospects, there won’t be any final verdict until her rivals show they, too, can hold their own in similarly unscripted settings during the coming campaign — notably in televised election debates. Coming soon, after the town halls, to a TV near you.