Martin Regg Cohn
Days away from the vote, is Wynne’s gambit a game-changer?
Voters wanted change. Now they’ve got it, according to Kathleen Wynne.
In an emotional speech Saturday, she surprised Ontarians by acknowledging what most had long ago determined: She can’t and won’t be back as premier.
Now what? Days away from the June 7 vote, is her gambit a game-changer?
Embattled leaders almost never offer tearful concession speeches in mid-campaign, before a single ballot is even tallied. But with her Liberals trailing badly, Wynne’s dramatic declaration was more anti-climactic than it was premature.
There was method to her madness — or boldness.
The Liberal leader can read the opinion polls as well as anyone, and since everyone a inevitable and make the best of the worst? Bear in mind that this was merely a concession speech, not yet a resignation speech.
For all her genuine personal pathos, this was a political play to save her Liberals from the abyss. Even if self-serving, it was also a calculated public appeal for the minority governments that many Ontarians claim to like.
Wynne argued her Liberals can still forestall an outright majority for Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives or Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats — either one of which she claimed would leave the province vulnerable to political extremes: Vote Liberal and you can still have change (a new premier), but without the upheaval of an unrestrained PC or NDP government.
With her Liberals facing not just decimation but elimination, Wynne was borrowing from the NDP playbook of the past.
New Democrats have long pitched the possibilities of minority government, albeit when they were running a distant third in federal and provincial elections, not vying for first place as they are now. Remember those public appeals from Ed Broadbent or Jack Layton to “borrow your vote” so that New Democrats could wield the balance of power and serve as the “conscience of Parliament?”
Now the shoe is on the other foot — with Wynne trying to kick-start her own campaign in the home stretch. Not so fast, says the NDP.
Piling ironies upon role reversals, Horwath’s New Democrats quickly scoffed at Wynne’s calculated appeal. Much like the Liberals when they were ahead in previous campaigns, Horwath urged Ontarians not to waste their votes on the third-place party, lest that allow the Tories to squeak up the middle in close races across the province.
For those who want to preempt a PC or NDP majority in favour of a minority legislature, there is no right or wrong answer to the question of how to cast a strategic vote without wasting it — in principle or in practice — for it depends on individual riding races.
The dirty little secret of all those published opinion polls is that they are based on relatively small samples that rely on robocalls or internet panels, not random samples reflecting Ontario’s demographic profile. Moreover, trying to extrapolate seat counts from provincewide polling is more art than science — not just because the regional breakdowns are especially small, but because they don’t take account of local factors such as incumbency.
That said, it’s still possible to make educated guesses. It’s no secret that outside of densely populated centres, the Liberals are barely in contention in this election — especially in the southwest, much of the north and everywhere rural. But in pockets of Toronto and the GTA, it’s harder to predict whether Liberals or New Democrats are best placed to win, and whether incumbency matters.
Hard as it is to vote strategically, it is harder still to predict minority governments, as much as some voters like them. The only certainty is that there is nothing wrong with the idea of parties working democratically together — formally or informally, in a coalition, alliance or ad hoc arrangement — despite the attempts by Ford’s Tories to dismiss them as the work of the devil.
Again this weekend, as he did at the outset of the campaign, Ford borrowed from the standard Tory playbook (written by ex-PM Stephen Harper) to delegitimize the established convention of parties that hold the majority of seats coming ogether to outvote the party with a mere plurality.
After first ruling out co-operation with the Liberals, Horwath has more recently acknowledged that there’s nothing illegitimate and everything legitimate about the parties with the most seats collectively having their say, and getting their way.
Despite the desire of the Tories to delegitimize or muzzle such thoughts, they are a healthy part of our democratic discourse. Voters deserve to know that the various party leaders — not least Mike Schreiner of the Greens, who also made himself heard on the weekend — are willing to talk constructively after the votes are counted.