What Ontario’s Liberals need to learn from Ford
A few days after the Ontario election, I was walking with a group of Liberal staffers on Wellesley St. We had just picked up our termination papers. It was about to rain. Suddenly, beside us, the window of a big black SUV opened and Doug Ford stuck out his head. He was grinning from ear to ear. As he started chatting with a group of school kids, I turned to one of my former coworkers and said: “And that … right there … is why we lost the election.”
Then — pretty much on cue — it started to rain.
The Ontario Liberals were in power for 15 years. My time in government goes back even further. As a bureaucrat, I wrote speeches for the last PC government. Then, I joined the Liberal team in 2004 and came back to help in the last election. Which means I’ve been in the truly weird position of having been a speech writer for every Ontario premier since Mike Harris.
I often say there are two kinds of politicians. The first kind tries to sound like the smartest person in the room. They’re on top of every policy detail and can impress an audience with facts figures and data. Their speeches are carefully crafted arguments about why we should do — or not do — a thing. Kathleen Wynne is that kind of speaker — undeniably bright and sharp.
The problem with trying to be the smartest person in the room is that there’s always someone who is actually smarter than you in the room. I once wrote a speech for Mike Harris for a genomics conference. He didn’t lecture scientists about science. I wrote the speech as a series of ethical questions in which he admitted he didn’t have all the answers. They ate it up.
Smart politicians can fall prey to the trap of trying to convince people rather than converse with them. And governments — particularly ones that have been around for a while — start to believe that everyone cares as much about the process of governing as they do.
Leaders’ speeches begin sounding like overly earnest civics lectures about how awesome government is. And when people don’t eat up the lectures — because they’re normal human beings and not policy wonks — the speeches often get even more wonky and policy-heavy. That’s like telling a person who doesn’t want to eat vegetables that what they really want is a second helping of vegetables.
Which brings me to the second kind of politician — the one who tries to be the best person in the room.
The “best” person in the room doesn’t mean the most moral or upstanding person. They’re the person who shows that they care about you. They tell stories. They make fun of themselves. They connect. They show you why they care — not just tell you that they care.
The best person in the room is there to make you feel like you matter — not only to convince you that they’re right. Mike Harris did this. Dalton McGuinty did this. Trudeau is a master at this. Doug Ford is, too. And it helped him win.
The “smart” people made fun of Doug Ford’s language about “folks” and “friends.” Pundits used big words to describe why he was wrong. Wynne’s campaign team tried to paint him as a bad guy — but no one believed it, because he obviously liked people. He liked talking to them. He was comfortable around them. He spoke their language.
If the Ontario Liberals want to win again, we need to be more like Doug Ford. We need to start talking like real people again — no lectures about government, no five-dollar words like “consequently” or “jurisdiction” or empty phrases like “Liberal values,” no mentioning the name of every policy initiative, no reciting figures to the third decimal place.
That doesn’t mean dumbing down the message or not talking about important ideas — but it does mean talking about ideas and issues people actually care about, rather than the things only we want to talk about.
It’s simple — talk to people, not at them. Roll down the window. Smile.
Otherwise, we’re going to be out in the rain for a long time.