Will Ontario see a hairpin turn to right?

Premier Doug Ford. Get used to it. If you are among the more than six out of 10 Ontario voters who ww never wanted to say those words, ww buck- a- beer can’t come soon enough.

It remains to be seen whether the patchwork of colour in this new Ontario — the city of Toronto aglow in NDP orange, the 905 banded in turning- point blue, a broad swath of middle Ontario also blue, yet the far north solidly orange — will have any mitigating effect on the unknown kk quantity that is the Ford agenda. a Should we anticipate a hairpin turn to the right, with Ford FF unveiling scorched- earth change cc out of the gate, Trump- style? Or will the PC establishment prevail, holding its new and untested leader to a more moderate pace, perhaps with an aa eye to building a blue wave strong enough to run beyond a single term?

Standing as they do today, with ww a freshly minted mandate, Ontario’s PCs must be shaking their tt heads in wonder, pinching themselves. tt To have survived t the weeks of chaos that saw a scandal- soaked Patrick Brown excised from the helm of the party only to watch Doug Ford emerge from a smouldering mess of a last- minute leadership convention, tearing up the party’s carefully- honed platform and suddenly spouting populist bromides that even a majority of the party’s own leaders appeared not to want.

To have survived all that and then to win. It’s the political equivalent of plunging at highspeed into a multi- car pileup in which ww you somehow, after spin- ning madly through the air, ass over teakettle, wheels to the sky, manage to land upright and intact. With the rubber on the road and not a scratch on the car. And nothing but empty highway ahead. And all of it yours.

But some PCs will know, deep down, that the man behind the wheel ww makes more than half the province really nervous. Maybe he makes them a bit nervous too.

Ontario, for all its nerves, is still a world apart from the United States. We didn’t just become them, no matter how these numbers break. An angry electorate made clear that if this tt was a change election, the f fury was all about ending the Liberal status quo.

And so it’s hard to envision, for the nearly six in 10 voters who parked their vote elsewhere, anything less than anger will erupt at the first sign of an aggressive, Trump- style approach to power. The morning after is likely to reek of careful-what-you-wish-for, as progress Ontario you- wish- ponders for, as progres- what comes next.

Nothing is likely to ease their pain of progressives quickly, after so toxic a campaign. In these final days, anger seemed to almost metastasize into ever more- caustic memes targeting each leader, mocking each campaign. The converted pleading with the converted — and throwing ugly shade, if not outright blocking, the other side.

Conversely, for true blue Ontario conservatives who have lived a generation under various iterations of progressive Liberal rule — particularly those in ridings led by longtime MPPs just itching to exercise power after so long in opposition — this is dawn, finally, after what seemed endless darkness.

One post making the rounds on Facebook — a plea for civility from an anonymous veteran Ontario government bureaucrat — captured the ugliness of it all. And pushed back, angry over anger itself.

The anonymous Ontario insider claimed to have worked under “13 ministers ( three Tory, 10 Liberal)” and while “some were ww cerebral, some were folk- sy, ss some were tough as nails, some were sweet as pie,” every one of them “were all in.”

“They took their job seriously. They worked hard. They suffered daily abuse from anyone and a everyone who felt that poli- ticians did not warrant respect or even decency.

“Everybody is posting about the importance of voting. Yup, agree. But the visceral anger over oo the past month of voters of e every inclination has been, well, disheartening is one word for it.

“It takes guts to run and it takes more guts to serve. It takes no courage or imagination to heap scorn. Before anyone complains about what they get out of democracy, maybe they could consider what they put into it.”