It’s a good time for Liberals, NDP to consider teaming up
“At the door, there was either grief or anger,” Catherine Fife said.
The New Democratic Party MPP from Waterloo had just won her fourth provincial election in a row, but she wasn’t in a celebratory mood.
Instead, she was sitting outside in the chilly night air, wondering how voters across Ontario had returned Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives to power. She knew how unhappy Waterloo voters felt. She had knocked on hundreds of doors in the riding in the past month.
The people she met who were experiencing grief were still “raw” as they struggled to accept the death of a loved one, the loss of time spent with family because of pandemic restrictions, or receiving poor health care from an underfunded system.
Others were angry about the overreach of emergency powers from government, or voiced frustration at two lost years in which they hadn’t been able to realize their own potential.
How, she wondered, if people felt so upset, had Ford been rewarded for his mediocre handling of the pandemic?
“I just cannot believe the people of Ontario gave Doug Ford a pass, and I wonder what the future of politics is going to be like,” she said at her post-election party.
The whole campaign had been the strangest one she had ever experienced, she said.
Two debates had been arranged for local candidates, one by CBC Radio and one by the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce. Fife said she was the only one who showed up for the CBC debate.
At the chamber of commerce, it was just her and the Green candidate. The president and CEO of the chamber, Ian McLean, said earlier this week that the chamber will likely no longer organize in-person debates because not enough candidates attend them.
“I’m very worried about democracy,” Fife said.
Perhaps people were so overwhelmed, in the aftermath of the pandemic, that they were taking in the sound bites from Ford and weren’t thinking critically, she wondered.
Perhaps the grief, anxiety and anger from the pandemic hadn’t mobilized them, but had left them debilitated instead.
In fact, more people voted against the Progressive Conservatives than for them. At the end of the night, Ford’s Conservatives scored a big majority government with 83 candidates leading or elected. They received almost 41 per cent of the popular vote.
The New Democrats, Liberals and Green Party together earned more than 53 per cent of the popular vote — but that progressive vote was split between 31 seats for New Democrats, eight for the Liberals, and one for the Greens, Guelph’s Mike Schreiner.
Thursday was an awful night for Liberals and New Democrats. Not only had they lost, but each of their party leaders, Steven Del Duca for the Liberals and Andrea Horwath for the New Democrats, broke the news that evening that they would step away from their roles as leader.
This leaves these parties weak and prone to internal dissension at a time when there are already very few checks on Ford.
He will be free to continue restricting the pay of nurses so severely that their paycheques have less spending power each year. He will continue to enable private companies to run long-term-care homes, even though the chances of dying from COVID-19 in those homes was higher than in homes run by non-profits.
There’s really only one way to stop this from happening again, and that’s for the Liberals and New Democrats to join forces instead of attacking one another as they so often did in this campaign. Now, with both leaders on the way out, would be a perfect time.
Fife wasn’t inclined to discuss that strategy on Thursday night.
But remember that the Liberals and New Democrats occupy the same centre-left territory.
When she was premier, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne often had policies that were to the left of the New Democrats and that’s how she kept her party’s ideas fresh and popular.
Remember too that the reason former prime minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives took control of the federal government in 2006 was because they had the discipline to unite the federal rightwing parties earlier.
It led to a nine-year run for that Conservative government. Harper became the longest-serving prime minister from a centre-right party since John A. Macdonald. Merging parties is painful, but it works.
In the cool light of the morning after, it’s a path that’s worth considering for Ontario.
I just cannot believe the people of Ontario gave Doug Ford a pass.
CATHERINE FIFE NDP MPP