If Wynne quits, then what?
The polls may not be accurate, but if so remember Rob Ford
In politics, as in life, be careful what you wish for. If Kathleen Wynne quits as premier, what next? Rather than forecasting the future, better to question present-day conventional wisdom. Notably this notion: If only the Liberals could lose Wynne, they might win again. The premier’s popularity is so laughably low in monthly polls — hovering at 11 per cent — that she is dragging the party down to a possible third-place finish in next year’s provincial election.Consider the corollary: A fresh face, untainted by (unproven) allegations of criminality and corruption, could give the party’s dying dynasty a new lease on life.
No doubt the premier’s departure would be welcomed by Wynne-haters, deficit-haters, hydro bill-haters, windturbine haters, and all-round Liberal haters. Whether they would ever vote Liberal is a question usually forgotten, but easily answered: unlikely under any circumstances.
As for progressives and centrists who combined to give Wynne’s Liberals their last majority, here’s a different question worth considering: Who — and what policies — would replace her?
Wynne wouldn’t be the first politician to fall out of public favour, her idiosyncrasies driving many people to distraction, detraction, disdain and disgust. We’ve seen this narrative before. Remember David Miller? The silver-haired, Harvard-educated Toronto mayor rode into office on a broom, promising to clean up city hall. After a few haughty years of hectoring and lecturing voters, he was down in the dumps, culminating in a messy garbage strike.
Sagging in the public polls, Miller’s re-election prospects looked bleak. He decided not to run again.
Wrongly, as it turned out for him. Badly, as it turned out for us.
The left-leaning Miller, in retrospect, did some things right. He pushed aggressively — annoyingly — for an LRT network that made sense then and still does now.
But weary voters were pining for change. And they got it in Rob Ford — his “gravy train” campaign serving as a precursor to Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” sloganeering.
Voter’s remorse was matched only by Miller’s regret: In the aftermath, those ever-changing opinion polls showed he would have won the election handily had he but stayed the course.
Like the ex-mayor, the premier was a prisoner of high expectations and prone to chronic overexposure. She proffered solutions to every problem — problematic for progressive politicians who sound progressively preachy.
Now Wynne is a lightning rod, taking the heat for her party’s sins after 14 years in power.
Nervous Liberals who think they can change the channel by changing leaders need to examine their assumption that Wynne is the cause, not the symptom, of what ails their party. No less an authority than the National Post proclaimed in a recent headline, “Kathleen Wynne is the Liberals’ greatest asset, not their biggest problem” (and one should believe everything one reads in objective newspapers).
Perhaps another pretender to the throne can be steamcleaned and dusted off to be presented as the fresh face of change. But refreshing the top leadership won’t solve the problem of recruiting new talent for an uninspiring cabinet and an increasingly infirm backbench.
New candidates are the lifeblood of any party, and the Liberals are having a hard time of it. Their fundraising has also fallen behind that of the Progressive Conservatives.
It doesn’t help that Wynne’s awful polling numbers, published monthly, have engendered a recurring narrative that the Liberals are destined to collapse. The reality, beyond the phoney war of a pre-election period, is more complicated.
Polling is broken everywhere in the political world, which is why underdogs keep coming back from behind amid unprecedented voter volatility. We also know that Ontario’s electorate is notoriously disengaged between elections, rendering those monthly polls highly misleading.
Most elections are not a referendum on the premier, they are a choice between the government and its opposition rivals, whose leaders remain relatively unknown and their platforms unformed. With her spring budget coming next week, Wynne is rolling out and reannouncing her own agenda — from eliminating the deficit to raising the minimum wage and making tuition free for low-income college students in the country’s fastest-growing economy.
Like any politician, Wynne hates being hated. Personality aside, however, her bigger challenge is to put forward progressive policies that voters can support, even if she remains unloved.
If she fails on that front, voters will get what they wish for — a change in government. Even at the risk, in the aftermath, of switcher’s remorse.