Wynne’s win no blessing for Trudeau Grits
Federal Liberals have been turning cartwheels, at least publicly, since Kathleen Wynne’s triumph in the Ontario election last Thursday. To hear the chatter it’s as though the Red Team has opened up the approaches to Rome and is marching on the imperial palace. Can Stephen Harper’s legions long withstand the wave of Liberalism sweeping across Canada’s most populous province, home to 121 of 338 seats in the next federal vote?
The celebrations are premature.
Certainly from a groundgame perspective, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been buoyed by the Ontario result. The federal and provincial wings of the Liberal party are essentially the same people, at the riding level. Volunteers and campaign workers are shared. This is somewhat less true in rural Ontario now than it is in urban centres, because the Green Energy Act and its wind turbines have alienated so many former countryside Liberals. But the countryside lacks the numbers to turn the tide. In the Greater Toronto Area, which already holds the whip hand population-wise and gains even more weight with the addition of new federal seats for Ontario, this is one party.
The Liberals were extraordinarily efficient at getting out their vote Thursday, which bespeaks good organization, efficient ground teams and a motivated base. Trudeau’s personal influence here cannot be dismissed; he campaigned actively with Wynne, despite the risk of brand bleed, more on that later, and contributed to her success. Trudeau is a ground-game politician. In that respect this Ontario race was a dress rehearsal for the next federal campaign. That’s the good news, from a Liberal perspective.
The bad news, in a nutshell, is that Premier Kathleen Wynne and her government, their performance and the decisions they make in wielding majority power, will lay the table for the 2015 vote in Ontario, which in turn will determine the outcome nationally. The Trudeau Liberals are now in the peculiar position of being quite vulnerable to decisions made by a government in which they have no representation. They can apply moral suasion. Whether that works out for them remains to be seen.
Of course there’s the fact of Ontario’s traditional saw-off between federal and provincial levels of government, which I and others have written about recently. Stretching back to the Pierre Trudeau-Bill Davis era, with a bit of deviation here and there to allow for the human factor, Ontarians have stayed left at one level while moving right at the other. This is not rocket science; it’s simply sensible bet-hedging. If you have a government at Queen’s Park that is borrowing and spending and bulking up social programs, best put some miserly bean counters in Ottawa, and vice-versa.
At the level of pure rhetoric, the Harper Conservatives now have a solid line of attack in Ontario, which they’d not have had given a Tim Hudak victory. It’ll be as simple as throwing a copy of the Wynne government’s May budget on an overhead projector and saying, “You may not like us but you still need us, and here’s why.”
Except if — and now we get to Trudeau’s vulnerability — Wynne herself shifts into austerity mode, driven by the looming threat of credit-agency downgrades. With Ontario’s net debt pushing $270 billion and 40 per cent of GDP, and more than $10 billion annually going to interest payments, it’s inevitable this problem will surface, particularly if interest rates start to rise from their current historic lows. Tight oil driven by crises in Ukraine and Iraq could also prove a spoiler.
This raises the prospect of Wynne imposing something like the Rae Days program of shared austerity that marked Bob Rae’s last year as Ontario premier in 1993-94, and caused Ontario unions, famously led by Leah Casselman and Buzz Hargrove, to disown him. It’s not likely, given that Wynne has spent the past six weeks campaigning on Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s free-spending budget, with its $12.5-billion deficit, that any kind of austerity will be imposed immediately. The temptation, perhaps driven by necessity, will be the 2015 provincial budget — just months before the federal election.
If Wynne handles this looming economic crisis with skill, restraint and a newfound parsimony — she has, after all, been released from her dependency on Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats — then she’ll make it easier for Ontarians to overlook the Conservatives’ economic street cred in 2015, and focus on their democratic failings.
If, on the other hand, she continues to borrow, tax and spend with abandon, or gets trapped in a Rae-like war of attrition with public service unions, she could salt Trudeau’s well. Inroads in B.C. and Quebec alone cannot win the federal Liberals power; they must have Ontario. It’s not at all as simple, in other words, as saying “Ontario moves into the Red column.” It may. Or it may not, depending on how Wynne plays the hand she’s been dealt.