Spare a thought for Ontario Liberal leadership hopefuls
Spare a thought, this season of good cheer, for Ontario’s Liberals, who find themselves broke, out of office and struggling to make friends.
Things change when you no longer have the keys to the treasury, especially for a party that so freely used the public purse to finance pricey goodies. The Liberals weren’t just ushered out of power in 2018 but were chased away by an angry population tired of being bribed with borrowed money.
The mean- spirited might say it’s rough justice that, having so freely spent the public’s money, Liberals should find themselves with little of their own. The corporate leaders and captive donors they used to squeeze for “donations” in return for access are no longer returning calls. Membership is way down and $10 million borrowed to fight the past election has to be paid down before they can start arming for the next one.
You might think an enterprise with so little promise would have a hard time finding anyone willing to serve as leader, but politics has never been short of people lacking ambition and big egos. And the pay’s not bad while you’re working on the turnaround.
Thus the party finds itself in the position of having more people seeking its leadership than it has seats in the legislature. Six hopefuls for a caucus of five, which needs to more than double its head count in the next election just to reach official party status and the extra money that comes with it. Premier Doug Ford’s government raised the bar on official status to 12 seats from eight after the past election, not to stymie the poor Liberals, mind, but to “take the politics” out of it.
The new boss will be chosen just 13 weeks from now at a convention in Mississauga. The lineup includes three former cabinet ministers, two former party candidates and a lawyer from Ottawa. While doing their best to sound chipper and cheerful, they’re also enthusiastically proclaiming the enormity of the challenge ahead, the better to claim credit for any perceived improvements down the road.
“However bad you think it is, it’s worse,” says Alvin
Tedjo, who placed third in his riding in 2018 and identifies himself as “a dedicated public servant and a passionate advocate for education, child care and the environment.”
Michael Coteau, who held several portfolios in Kathleen Wynne’s government, asserts that “the party that we knew no longer exists.”
He says Liberals “lost the trust of Ontarians” through their arrogance and knowit- all attitude, and need to adopt a new attitude to win it back.
Such claims sound a lot like similar regrets offered up six years ago, when the party was trying to rid itself of the memory of Dalton Mcguinty. Mcguinty had so worn out his welcome that Wynne felt the need to apologize 11 times at a single sitting for the gas plant scandal that helped bring him down and left his chief of staff facing jail time. We were assured there would be no more of that sort of thing in the new, improved post- Mcguinty Liberals, which would provide a more open, more honest administration, one that wasn’t forced to drain the treasury to keep its seats.
Except it didn’t work out that way, and by the time Wynne’s forces were decimated in the spring of 2018 the interest costs on public borrowing were up to a billion dollars a month and the government was so strapped it found itself forced to confront the same public sector unions that had worked diligently to keep it in power, and benefited so richly in return.
If the current leadership aspirants learned from that experience, it’s not overwhelmingly evident. Perceived frontrunner Steven Del Duca resonates the same sort of glib self- assurance that so characterized the Wynne regime. Rival candidate Kate Graham says Del Duca is “a nice guy” but adds that “it’s more a question of whether or not the party stands a chance of success if we don’t look dramatically different than we did in 2018.” Del Duca, the former transport minister, is perhaps best remembered for his effort to pressure transit authorities to put a station in his riding over objections that it was expensive, unnecessary and would be little used.
Other aspirants have dangled pricey promises that suggest the party has yet to learn how to campaign on anything but big spending projects. Tedjo vows to revive and expand a guaranteed income plan axed by the Tories, and says the $ 6 billion cost of implementing a full universal program “is a small price to pay.” Coteau wants to offer free public transit to get people out of their cars and launch a “massive environmental retrofit of all public buildings.”
All the candidates agree Liberals have to confer with the grassroots, do a better job of listening and, as Tedjo puts it, “find a way to get in touch with what people are asking us to do.”
Listening is good. It’s learning that seems to be hard.
MORE PEOPLE SEEKING ITS LEADERSHIP THAN IT HAS SEATS IN THE LEGISLATURE.