Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote
What do you do when it seems that all the choices in front of you are poor ones?
Recent elections posed exactly that difficulty for a majority of voters. All candidates will have their core of followers who believe that their candidates can do no wrong, so we’ll forget about them for the nonce.
Let’s go back over 500 days ago to the US of A. Leading up to the most recent U.S. election it looked like the only choice on the Republican side was Donald Trump, and for a while there, it was a hotly contested race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton for the Democrat nod. We know that in the end, Clinton prevailed in the bid to go head to head with Donald Trump.
I’m sure that if a majority of Canadians had had an opportunity to weigh in on the Democrat leadership bid, Sanders would have prevailed. His style of politics, more social than not, would resonate best with Canadians. Sanders’s problem was that his bid for leadership came on the heels of the two-term Obama presidency, which had moved forward with as much of social programs as could be tolerated by both the American House of Representatives and the Senate. Americans had had enough of this style of more-left-than-not social agenda, and Clinton became the presidential contender.
Both Clinton and Trump were deeply flawed candidates for the top U.S. job. I heard so many Canadians asking, “C’mon America! You have 326 million people, give or take a couple, and these are the best two leadership candidates you can come up with?”
Many American responded to this choice of presidential candidates by simply not voting. In the 2016 election that Trump won, voter turnout was pegged at about 58 per cent.
Now, I am not American, so I was not faced with having to choose between two candidates, one of whom I would describe as a wild card and the other as a candidate who I simply did not trust. I would have voted; after all it is a citizen’s duty. I can tell you though that I would have held my nose while voting.
The people of Ontario have just had to face an almost similar dilemma, although as Canadians, we’re pretty nice, so our leaders tend not to be quite as abrasive as politicians to our south. Ontario became very disillusioned with the Wynne Liberal government, with good cause I would say. Wynne herself conceded, before voters went to the polls, that she could not win. That left the voters of Ontario with two choices, Conservative Doug Ford, the NDP’S Andrea Horwath.
Ford has been compared to Trump, but perhaps as a candidate of a somewhat less extreme temper. Ford has been called mercurial, and his politics definitely seems to be of the right-wing variety.
Horwath has already had two kicks at this electoral can since gaining the leadership of the party in 2009 and came up short each time. I would presume she had hoped that third time would be the charm. A large part of Wynne’s downfall was how deep she dug in to voters’ pockets during her premiership, and Horwath is promising to do the same with no balancing of the budget in her spending platform
Leading up to the election, the Conservatives and the NDP were running neck and neck in the polls, but in the end Doug Ford and the PC party prevailed winning a resounding majority. Ford, not an uncontroversial candidate., has made some pretty extreme promises, including dropping the price of gas by 10 cents per litre.
Much like Trump, Doug Ford seems like an unlikely choice for leader. Time will tell if the Ontario PC party and the Ontario electorate have made wise choices.