‘We lost our way,’ Liberal delegates told
Voters ‘made the right call,’ interim leader says at election post-mortem John Fraser rallied his party Saturday over the election results.
Voters demoted Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government to a third-party rump of seven MPPs in the June election because it had a “listening” problem, party members said Saturday at a post-mortem in Toronto.
“They made the right call … they’d had enough of us,” Liberal interim leader John Fraser told more than 700 delegates from across the province after a tense question-and-answer session behind closed doors with top campaign officials on what led to Doug Ford’s stunning Progressive Conservative victory.
Fraser said the turning point for the party that governed Ontario for almost 15 years — Tuesday would mark that anniversary — was the sale of almost half the shares in taxpayerowned utility Hydro One to raise billions of dollars to build transit and other infrastructure. Public opinion polls at the time showed the move was highly unpopular, but Wynne’s government persisted, saying the partial privatization was the best way to raise the money.
“We didn’t hear what they were saying back to us,” said Fraser, MPP for Ottawa South, in a comment echoed by others at the meeting.
Sources said the crowded feedback session with campaign strategist David Herle, former deputy premier Deb Matthews and two others — with Wynne in the audience — had an “angry undercurrent,” with so many questions that the time allotted had to be extended.
Defeated cabinet minister Steven Del Duca told reporters there were “lots of very strong opinions, which is exactly what the Ontario Liberal Party needs right now.”
Herle declined to comment but Matthews said “the big theme is listen, listen, listen. When you’re in government for a long time, you tend to rely more on your ministers and caucus and staff, and not as much on the grassroots.
“I think we did make that mistake,” she told the Star.
Herle’s presentation included a slide titled “Baggage was catching up to us and sticking,” with voters lumping the controversial Hydro One sale, skyrocketing electricity prices and the previous Dalton McGuinty government’s scandal over cancelled gas plants into one category.
Another slide pointed to a “major credibility issue” for the Liberals on management of taxpayers’ money — which Ford’s campaign easily exploited — and an inability to capital- ize on turmoil in the PC party after leader Patrick Brown quit over sexual misconduct allegations that he vigorously denied.
“This morning, we confronted some harsh truths,” Fraser said in his speech. “We lost our way, and in turn we lost the election.” Wynne, who remains the MPP for Don Valley West after stepping down as leader, said in a brief interview that she struggled with attending the post- mortem, which also drew defeated cabinet ministers, MPPs, candidates and her 2013 leadership rival Sandra Pupatello.
“I needed people to know that I stood by what we did but that I also know that we made mistakes,” she acknowledged, saying of her Hydro decision: “We were trying to solve problems.”
The party needs to be in the “activist centre” of Ontario’s political discourse, she added, using a phrase she often employed to describe her positioning. A number of party members signalled a need to return to a more middle-of-the-road stance, after campaign promises to expand pharmacare, child care and dental care that would have pushed the province back into deep deficits, after the Lib- erals boasted for years of the need to balance the budget with Ontario more than $300 billion in debt.
“I don’t see us going too far left or too far right. The middle of politics is important … it pulls the other parties in. It moderates our politics,” said Fraser.
Del Duca, who didn’t rule out a run for party leader, said the Liberals need to find the “pragmatic centre” between Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats, now the official Opposition, and Ford’s PCs.
“I don’t believe we were in the pragmatic centre to the extent we should have been. And that was a message I heard over and over again in my own riding,” he added. “We were a little bit tone-deaf to some of their concerns, cost-of-living anxieties for example.”
Fraser said Liberals must rebuild so they are ready to become “an alternative to the cuts and the chaos we know are coming” under the new government, which has promised to find $6 billion in “efficiencies” on Ontario’s $150-billion annual budget.
“My gut tells me that when Doug Ford is done ransacking Ontario, there will be even more young Liberals ready to build again,” Fraser added, pointing to strong attendance at the daylong meeting as a positive sign for a party that suffered such a devastating defeat in the spring.
“I needed people to know that I stood by what we did but that I also know that we made mistakes.” KATHLEEN WYNNE LIBERAL MPP