Ontario’s new political landscape will challenge voters
Fasten your seatbelts Ontario. You’re headed for a rough ride in a turbulent provincial election campaign that starts this week.
Radical changes in the three main parties, an angry, polarized public and fragmented mass media have torn through Ontario’s political landscape like rampaging bulldozers. Nothing seems familiar.
Indeed, it’s as if a tornado, earthquake and hurricane hit us at once. While it’s as important as ever to be an informed, engaged voter, it will be harder to be one this June 7 than it was four years ago.
Since the 2014 provincial election, the political divide in Ontario has become a yawning chasm.
The centre has not held. The choices are starker. The 15-year-old Liberal government has, with a list of costly, progressive promises, lurched further to the left. The New Democrats, who offered a moderate, centrist alternative four years ago, have likewise moved in that direction with pledges to expand social programs and run big deficits.
As for the Doug Ford-led Progressive Conservatives, they remain a puzzle, and potentially an alarming one.
While the PCs earlier this year brought forward a modest platform that hugged the centre of the political spectrum, that agenda was torn up by Ford when he replaced Patrick Brown as leader, after Brown was felled by sexual misconduct allegations.
While it’s premature to say what kind of conservative Ford really is — and that’s partly because we still have only pieces of his PC platform puzzle — it’s clear he’s a populist.
Despite being a well-connected millionaire, Ford proclaims himself a man of the people. Only he can save them from the elites, he says. And in words echoing the noise coming from south of the border, Ford vows to bring jobs back to Ontario and restore its glory days.
Perhaps such upheaval is to be expected. This is the era of Donald Trump and of Brexit. People are frightened by what globalization and the ongoing technological revolution, with its artificial intelligence and robotics, might bring.
Millions have lost faith in old ways and old politics. Just as many are hungry for new answers, as simplistic as they might be.
Ontario is in the midst of a generational shift, too. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won the 2015 federal election in large part due to the support of Millennials. So what are Ontario’s Millennials thinking today?
It could be harder than ever to know. The mass media delivering the political messages have become more fragmented. Voters are increasingly turning to online sites and social media for information and analysis while the traditional mainstream — and generally more moderate — media that consist of daily newspapers, TV and radio stations have less influence.
The Liberals, PCs and NDP are already using Facebook ads and voter data to influence the election outcome.
The Progressive Conservatives have added their own wrinkle — simulated news. People can watch online what appears to be a traditional, filmed newscast. But in this case, the news is coming from the PCs, not an independent network, and PC staffers, not independent journalists. Supposedly other media can’t be trusted.
In this fraught, transformed political landscape, Ontario voters must work hard, become educated and know always who the messenger is.
And on June 7 at the polling station, they must ask themselves: Fear and loathing aside, what’s truly best for Ontario?