Martin Regg Cohn

Liberal leader is warning voters to be careful what they wish for,

Elections are sometimes about change. But they are always about choice — that's democracy.

What makes this campaign so strange is how hard the three major party leaders are trying to limit your choices to just two picks — by eliminating one of their rivals as so unqualified as o be unelectable. Which makes this the most bizarrely binary three-way race ever. The NDP’s Andrea Horwath set the stage early by declaring that voters had already disqualified Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne at the starting line. Citing an insatiable appetite for change, Horwath confidently framed the ballot question as a two-way choice between herself and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.

By her logic Ford is utterly undeserving, leaving her, naturally, as the default choice — the only choice.

Ford, for his part, quickly bought into Horwath’s premise, echoing her attacks on Wynne’s Liberals as irredeemably doomed. The difference, of course, is that he concludes the NDP are dangerously unqualified to govern.

And so, by a process of elimination, Ford offers his Tories as the only viable and electable alternative, making himself the primary binary option.

Now, a third voice is struggling to make itself heard. On the strength of a winning performance at Sunday night’s televised leaders debate, Wynne is making the case that voters woke up this week to a more difficult dilemma — a third kind of binary.

The difference? Wynne takes as her starting point that Ford is unqualified to be premier, and instead wants voters to compare her Liberals with Horwath’s New Democrats before making their final choice.

Much of this may be wishful thinking by Wynne. But she is warning voters to be careful w

Meeting with the Toronto Star’s editorial board Monday, she made the case that the more voters see and hear of Ford, the more they are turning away from him. Wynne’s challenge, of course, is that the more voters veer away from Ford, the more they may view Horwath’s New Democrats as the best way to block him.

Certainly, in swaths of the province where the Liberals have long been uncompetitive — Windsor, London and the southwest, much of eastern Ontario, and almost all rural ridings — this election is a two-way PC-NDP race.

But in Toronto and parts of the GTA, it may be a different story. We don’t know yet whether this traditional electoral fortress is crumbling or remaining loyally Liberal — just that in the 2014 election, Horwath’s New Democrats were almost wiped out.

This time, both parties are competing for much of the same territory on both policy and geography, vying for voters in the 416 and 905 regions. Both leaders are offering variations on pharmacare and cheaper child care, while promising a $15 minimum wage.

But in Sunday’s debate, and at Monday’s editorial board meeting, Wynne argued that the NDP are too rigidly ideological and beholden to leftwing union views — the mirror image of Ford’s right-wing, anti-union Tories.

Amid the binary choices of a two-way campaign, she is recasting herself as the third way.

Wynne returned to the issue of a long-running strike at York University — now in its third month and deemed hopelessly stalemated by an outside investigator.

The NDP blocked back-towork legislation before the election, and Horwath told the editorial board last week that she’d still oppose it after the election if she won power.

Wynne also questioned the NDP’s insistence on targeting only non-profit child care under its subsidized plan for infants and toddlers, noting that Horwath’s approach would exclude families now enrolled in pre-existing forprofit daycare centres. Most outside experts rate the Liberal program, offering free child care for preschoolers, as more practical and better designed.

While the NDP shares “simi- lar values,” Liberals embrace “practical solutions, and I’m not going to let ideology get in the way,” Wynne argued.

“We really, I believe, run the most progressive government in North America.”

Of course, it may be that Wynne’s attempt to cast the campaign as a contrast between Liberals and New Democrats is beside the point. Perhaps Ford’s Tories will ultimately form a majority government on the strength of their bedrock rural support and pockets of populist fervour.

Even if the PCs fall short of a majority, Ford may still be so far in front of the opposition parties in a minority legislature — NDP, Liberal and possibly Green — that they can’t (or won’t) stop him from being premier. In which case, all those fantasies of binary choices will be overtaken by the realities of a multiple-choice election.

That’s democracy — it’s all about choices.