Positioning itself as government in waiting
Party appears to be strongest it has been in decades
Ontario’s New Democrats are heading into the upcoming election in their strongest position in decades, and are now setting out to accomplish what they couldn’t last time — getting voters to see them as the government in waiting.
On paper, the deck is stacked in their favour — they are the official Opposition, they’re well financed and they have dozens of incumbents spread across the province. But the challenge is in converting those positive electoral factors into real votes and real seats, including in areas they have not won in a long time.
With the Progressive Conservatives polling around 35 per cent, the NDP are seizing on that to say the majority of Ontarians don’t want Doug Ford to continue as premier, and are trying to get the anti-Ford vote to coalesce around them.
That’s the Liberal tack, as well, and two recent polls suggest they have pulled ahead of the NDP. But the New Democrats believe they will be able to attract the non-PC vote on election day, June 2.
“For us, to be able to finally talk to those people from a reasonable position of strength in terms of having 40 seats, having a well-financed party, having an experienced leader, as compared to where the Liberals are today, is a dramatic difference from going into 2018,” NDP campaign director Michael Balagus said in a recent interview.
The Liberals were cut down in 2018 from a majority government to holding just seven seats, not enough for official party status. That’s not the party that will succeed in toppling Ford, the NDP will be telling voters.
“We cannot afford, as a province, to wait four years in hopes that maybe the Liberal party will be strong enough again to get rid of him,” Balagus said.
“If you want him gone this time, (the message) is you’ve got to get behind us. We’ve got to come together and do it.”
But, where some see an experienced leader in Andrea Horwath, others see someone who is taking a fourth kick at the can, who may have already grown the party as much as she can.
“This is going to be sort of a key question: Does she still have the capacity to continue to move the party forward,” said Cristine de Clercy, a political-science professor at Western University.
For a period during the 2018 campaign, it appeared as though the NDP could win. Then its lead quickly dissipated and the Tories eventually won a large majority.
In this election, New Democrats need to not only gain more seats, but hang on to all of their existing ones, retaining Liberal voters they picked up last time, de Clercy said, and that may be easier said than done with the Liberals in the midst of a rebuilding effort.
“In 2018, (Horwath) was fighting a wounded and dying Liberal party, so it was a different kind of political contest,” she said.
Chris Loreto, the managing principal at public affairs firm StrategyCorp and a Progressive Conservative on the party executive, said the right mix of factors for the NDP to win includes voters being angry with the Tories, being unattracted to what Liberal leader Steven Del Duca is offering and actually being open to the NDP leading the province.
“When it looked like they were going to ride a bit of a wave in the last election, people began to put the brakes on a bit,” he said. “They weren’t ready then. The question is, are they ready now for potentially an NDP government?”
The NDP’s broad-based support — they hold seats in the north, south and southwest, the east and the Greater Toronto Area — poses a challenge for campaign messaging, Loreto said. They will be battling the Liberals for seats in Toronto, while contending with Tories in places like Windsor, in particular for blue-collar, autoworker votes.
“They have a difficult task of trying to drive differentiations against different oppositions in different geographies,” Loreto said.
Balagus said southwestern Ontario was the region where support collapsed in 2018, costing them government. It will be a key area to target this time, he said, along with Greater Toronto Area ridings in Mississauga, Scarborough, Brampton and Durham Region.
In terms of messaging, the NDP will be focusing on what needs to be fixed and how they pledge to address those problems, but will also be reminding voters of the party’s strong position as a challenger to Ford, relative to the Liberals, and highlighting parts of the Liberal record that are still unpopular with voters.
They will also be comparing Horwath and Del Duca, Balagus said.
“That’s probably our greatest strength in dealing with cross-pressure Liberal-NDP voters,” he said.