NDP gaining traction early in campaign
“I’ve never voted NDP,” said a woman in South Windsor, where NDP MPP Lisa Gretzky campaigned Monday.
“But I will see,” she said. “You’ve got a great agenda,” a man said, sounding surprised after listening to Gretzky. “I would like to see them pull it off,” retired autoworker Ken Kavanaugh said. “Something new, not the status quo. I’m open to seeing what they could do.” It’s early, only one week into the official campaign, but this provincial election has changed. The NDP has surged to second place in the polls, and it has the momentum. Initially framed as a race between the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives, it’s shaping up to be a race between the Conservatives and the NDP. There’s even speculation about the possibility of an NDP government or an NDP-led coalition. Could Windsor and Essex County go from three thirdparty MPPs to three government MPPs?
“It’s all positive,” said Windsor-Tecumseh NDP MPP Percy Hatfield, citing a better platform vetted by former federal parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page and a better organized campaign.
There has been a surge in volunteers and requests for signs at Gretzky’s campaign office. “There’s a tremendous amount of optimism in terms of where this campaign could go for us,” said Gretzky’s campaign manager, Kieran McKenzie.
“At this point (NDP leader) Andrea Horwath is where she wants to be — on the rise and not being written off,” said former Windsor-Riverside MPP Dave Cooke, a senior cabinet minister in Ontario’s first NDP government in 1990.
“The columnists are talking about her as a legitimate candidate. If I were still a candidate for the NDP, I’d be pretty darn happy with how the campaign has started.”
Poll Tracker, which aggregates all publicly available polling data, shows the Conservatives still lead with 40.8 per cent support. The NDP are second with 30.7 per cent, and the Liberals third with 23.5 per cent. Look a little closer at several recent polls, and it’s even more interesting. Conservative support has fallen by 0.7 per cent and Liberal support by 1.4 per cent. But NDP support has risen by 3.6 per cent.
And Conservative support, while considered the most solid and easily enough to form a majority government, hadn’t moved much in weeks before falling slightly.
Has it peaked already? More people name the NDP as their second choice in several polls.
And 78 per cent of Liberals motivated by a desire to stop controversial PC leader Doug Ford said they’d switch to the NDP if it appears that party can stop him, according to a poll by Pollara Strategic Insights for Maclean’s. All this means that NDP support could continue rising and Liberal support could continue falling.
The public elementary school teachers’ union, which represents 81,000 teachers and has supported the Liberals for more than a decade, just endorsed the NDP.
What’s behind the party’s rise? The last election was Premier Kathleen Wynne’s first as party leader. She came across as progressive and full of integrity. Now it seems like the Liberals will do anything to get re-elected, from deficit spending to buying peace with unions. “People didn’t think it was in her DNA, and it turned out it was,” said Cooke, still a keen political observer.
And after 15 years of the Liberals and their scandals and skyrocketing hydro bills, polls show 80 per cent of voters want change.
“I was always a Liberal,” another woman said Monday, “but I don’t know. I have to think about change.”
Hydro “is crazy,” Silvio Venerus told Gretzky.
So far, that change is Ford, but “the more people watch him, the more they’re going to hesitate,” predicted Cooke. “People want to defeat the Liberal government, but they’re not going to be mindless about it.”
Ford, who was part of the spectacle when his hard-drinking, crack-smoking brother Rob was mayor of Toronto, says he’ll cut $6 billion from the budget, cut taxes for middle-income earners by 20 per cent and spend $5 billion more on transit in Toronto. He’ll do this by finding “efficiencies.”
It’s like he’s winging it.
And people fear that “efficiencies” means cuts that will leave blood on the floor.
Then there’s Horwath and the NDP.
She’s been leader for almost a decade, through two elections, without making much of a mark — until, maybe, now. She’s personable. She’s the most popular leader.
While Wynne and Ford beat each other up — she compares him to U.S President Donald Trump and he accused her of “shady tricks” — Horwath is offering a positive alternative. “While these two argue,” she said during the first debate, “our hydro bills are going through the roof.”
In her latest ad, she smiles and lays out a simple, progressive, positive plan for drug and dental coverage for all Ontarians, converting student loans to grants so students don’t graduate with debt and asking the richest to pay more tax to do this.
Not everything in the NDP’s platform is believable, like buying back Hydro One and cutting hydro bills by 30 per cent. But, said Cooke, who doesn’t hold back when his party bungles something, “she makes you feel good. She’s got the potential of doing the kind of stuff Trudeau did in the federal campaign. He was the people’s candidate. He was optimistic. You watched him when he was with people, and he made you feel good.
“All of us want our politicians to give us a feeling of optimism about the future and that they’re approachable people.” Added McKenzie: “The rest of the province is catching up to what we’ve known down here for a long time.”
Windsor doesn’t vote for government members at all costs, he said. It votes for people who fight for issues that are important to the community.
He cited Dan’s Law, Gretzky’s private member’s bill calling for Ontario to eliminate the threemonth waiting period for home and palliative care for people who move here from other provinces. It was named after Dan Duma, a Windsor autoworker who moved to Alberta when the GM plant here closed but returned after being diagnosed with liver cancer. He couldn’t die at home because he couldn’t get home care. The province just changed the regulation.
A lot of voters Gretzky talked to want better health care.
Fran Faroni talked about her friend’s 98-year-old mother who waited in a hospital hallway for 15 hours. The party’s platform for Southwestern Ontario includes opening 89 vacant beds at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare.
It also includes Windsor in the environmental assessment for high-speed rail, twinning Highway 3 and creating a stream within the Jobs and Prosperity Fund to promote manufacturing research and development. People want a government that will invest in service — without the baggage, said Gretzky. While the polls and endorsements “definitely give us that little extra bounce in our step,” said Gretzky, it doesn’t change the way NDP candidates are campaigning.
“I just go out and knock on as many doors as I can and say hello and remind them we’ve been doing what we said we’d do, in my case, standing up for local Windsor issues,” said Hatfield. “We don’t take anything for granted,” said McKenzie, who ran Gretzky’s campaign in 2014, when she knocked off Liberal cabinet minister Teresa Piruzza. “We have work to do in an election, and the work is talking to people as much as we can about the issues they’re facing and the things we think could address those problems.”
Cooke remembers former Windsor West MP Herb Gray, an MP for four decades and deputy prime minister under Jean Chretien, telling him, “You’ve got to run every election as if you’re going to get defeated. Take voters for granted and you’ll be history.”
And in this election in particular, “people are really trying to hold parties accountable,” said Gretzky.
Said one woman, “I’m watching all the debates so I will know what’s going on.”
The rest of the province is catching up to what we’ve known down here for a long time.