Provincial Politics – Page 3

Ford’s Frolic.

May 23, 2022May 22, 2022 by Peter Lowry

If you want to frolic with an elephant, now’s your chance. It is the beast snickering behind you as you cast your ballot. Sure, you can vote for Doug Ford and his cronies. They are using you, as you think you are using them.

But that defiance on your part—that vote for Ford’s cabal—is not going to solve your issues. You think your vote is going to stick it up the backside of the man? Yet the only backside that will feel it is yours.

We have just come through the worst of a world-wide pandemic. There is the danger of a world war in the offing in Europe. Inflation is rampant everywhere and there is no easy fix for it. We can all visualize the fat cats in their office towers getting rich on their profiteering and our suffering.

But do you really want someone as ignorant as Ford to help you get even?

Doug Ford is there for Doug Ford, not for you. He has no time for you if you elect him and his cronies again. Ford is a fraud.

Maybe we can get his sticker company to print labels you can wear saying: “I’ve been screwed by Doug Ford.”

And you best keep that job you’ve got. There are two sides to an inflationary cycle. The second side is all downhill. Ford has already screwed all the destitute people on ODSP and Ontario Works. He cut those programs back four years ago. You might not have noticed. The food banks were all closing during the pandemic. You might not have noticed. On the downside, you are going to discover the truth of that “screwed” sticker.

Doug Ford wants to pave his way across the farmlands and wetlands of Ontario with superhighways you do not need. He is doing it for his developer friends. They know how to show appreciation to a politician.

Mind you, he has already told you what you will get for voting for him. He thinks your vote is worth five cents. And that is what he says he will take off the Ontario tax on gasoline—if you vote for him.

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The Death of Conservatism.

May 22, 2022May 21, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It dies with a whimper, not a scream. It collapses from within. It was unwieldy at the best of times. It never was the big tent in which few believed. It dies in Alberta as it does across the country. Ottawa area MP Pierre Poilievre has crafted a eulogy.

When Poilievre embraced the “convoy to Ottawa” in the winter, it was the death knell. He picked the wrong side. When Jason Kenney found he could not control the far right, his days were numbered. The rift in the supposedly united conservatives in Alberta was down the middle. Even in Ontario, the pegs of the big tent have been pulled on populist Doug Ford and the wind is rising.

The annual federal conservative leadership contest is mired in Pierre Poilievre’s poison of the blame game. The divide between Jean Charest and Poilievre is too wide for one party. Leslyn Lewis and the also-rans stand apart as background to the game being played. Rancour rules and Patrick Brown’s legions of the sub-continent’s diaspora wonder in what farce they have signed conservative party memberships.

Ontario has started to vote and we find the progressive conservatives of our history and gentler times have passed on. Instead, we have the selfishness and uncaring of a rapacious cabal, calling themselves ‘conservative,’ seeking our votes. An ignorant Doug Ford said repeatedly on the province’s leaders’ debate the other day that he thinks the purpose of education is to get “good jobs.” This man who has been controlling billions earmarked for education in this province is obviously ignorant of the purpose of our education system.

It is really too bad that Mr. Ford only attended school long enough to want to be a sticker salesman. Many more of us want to be part of a better society. While knowledge is always very useful, we want education that encourages our children to use the power of their minds to learn, to analyze, to plan, to socialize and to care.

At least, in Ontario today, we have recourse. We have two choices. We can vote the Ford’s uncaring cabal out of office or we can suffer the consequences.

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Vote a better Ontario.

May 21, 2022May 20, 2022 by Peter Lowry

People are already voting in Ontario. And I can assure you, it is far more convenient to vote in the ten days of advance polls than to get in line with the laggards on June 2. And I am sticking to my morning line predictions. I think Doug Ford will be unable to win a majority.

Women are making the difference. They really dislike Doug Ford. They see him as a buffoon. Nurses hate him. Teachers abhor him. And in the confidentiality of the polling booth, Ford’s fate will be determined.

We have to disagree with those who are waiting for Ford to defeat himself. He already has. His health minister is quitting and that is no surprise. Working for that buffoon would not be fun. Ford failed to follow the science from the beginning of the pandemic. The fact that the coronavirus is still taking a high toll in Ontario is because of the lack of leadership from Queen’s Park.

Our young people have suffered enough under a regime that would put private school people in charge of education in this province. Our children have suffered. Computer programs cannot replace a teacher’s guidance. Computers are never a solution to socialization.

Even the lock downs were a disaster. Ford asked Ontario to stay away from their Muskoka cottages and then went himself. He does not think. He doesn’t care about us. He is a self-centered bully and braggard.

He wants your vote! And you know why. He wants to spend $10 billion of our money building highway 413. The fact that the highway is hardly needed seems to be beside the point. He wants it so his developer supporters can make money building over-priced cookie-cutter homes around the highway interchanges that used to be productive farmland.

My feeling is that Ford will not cruise to a majority. A majority after June 2 is hardly likely. What is more likely to happen is that the liberals, new democrats and greens are going to have to step up and say we can work together and do a better job. It will take a lot of cooperation but we could have better government for the next four years. We need the liberals for their experience, the NDP for their drive and the greens for their concern for the environment. Give it a try, we might like it.

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Doug Doesn’t Debate.

May 19, 2022May 18, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Ontario conservative leader Doug Ford showed up at the only all-Ontario leaders’ debate Monday—book of notes in hand. It was an event designed for sociology students. It revealed more about the participants than they really wanted to be known. Doug Ford displayed his ignorance, Andrea Horwath showed that she was out of her depth, Steven Del Duca fumbled some pithy stuff he had memorized but came out all right by default and Mike Schreiner won the debate by showing he knew how to debate.

We used to think of debating as something you could learn in universities. A good debate was not whether you won or lost but how well you made your case. Frankly, if you want the fast summary: Schreiner won on points, Del Duca got a pass on persistence, Horwath came across as strident and Ford showed viewers his ignorance.

Ford failed. If we made watching the debate a requirement before you could vote, Ford would be the loser he should be. That man does not have the attitude nor the brains for being premier of a province of close to 15 million people. He is incompetent at least and mean spirited at worst.

Andrea Horwath of the new democrats showed why she has gotten nowhere in her dozen or so years at Queen’s Park. She was strident and a harridan as she disobeyed the rules that were there to help her hold her own. The most telling moment was when Steven Del Duca quietly told her that she should see Doug Ford smile whenever she attacked the last liberal government.

Yet, the best words of the show were spoken by Mike Schreiner of the greens. It was when Schreiner referred to the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and Ontario Works as “Legislative Poverty.” In a time when close to a million people needed help surviving, Doug Ford cut their funding. When food banks were being forced to shut their doors, Ford attacked the poor and impoverished. He likes picking targets that cannot fight back.

If Mike Schreiner had much of a party behind him, he might have done some good. As it is, we expect that the beneficiaries of the leaders’ debate will be the liberals. They need to get Del Duca and a bunch of new liberals elected. I think this event helped.

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“All Politics is Local.”

May 18, 2022May 18, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Doug Ford’s failure to recognize the “All politics is local” adage is likely to cost him an attorney general when they count the ballots in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte on June 2.

Putting that out-of-town carpetbagger in our riding was a bad move to begin with and our morning line says we should not be surprised that, without a majority of conservatives elected, Mr. Ford will be unable to form a sustainable government. It was an assessment of this election in Ontario that surprised some people. You can write it off as an honest attempt to help get Doug Ford’s mitts out of the cookie jar, if you wish, yet there is little doubt that his meanness far exceeds that of conservative Mike Harris at the turn of the century. Ending the Ford regime is the outcome that Ontario needs.

And this riding is good news. The change here in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte is that the liberal candidate is the three-term mayor of Barrie. In all my years in Barrie, I have never seen so many liberal signs. This is not a riding where signs mean much but Mayor Lehman is a strong campaigner and he has knocked on thousands of doors in his lifetime. And his campaign teams are reporting a good reception.

I expect this riding is going to the liberal candidate. It will be another liberal gain from the conservatives.

And I hear the same is happening in Toronto, London, Ottawa and Niagara Falls. I’m not getting the reports that I used to get from Leamington and Windsor but I am always hopeful for that part of Ontario.

And I have no problem with a Liberal and NDP deal. It is the kind of partnership the NDP needs to focus on. We have to make sure that highway 413 never happens. At the same time, we need the Bradford Bypass. We will have some strong voices in the caucus to keep the province’s plan for the bypass to happen with out causing any damage to the environment of the Holland Marsh. (In fact, it will speed the trucking of produce from the Marsh to Ontario markets.) Many of the new overpasses on Highway 400 are already in place to handle the traffic on summer weekends, as well as year-round.

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The Morning Line.

May 17, 2022May 16, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Politicians are not race horses. We rarely see their workouts. They sometimes come up lame after our assessment. What we try to do is give you the best guess of where the politicos might be on the morning after election day.

The election being held June 2, 2022 in Ontario is not the easiest to forecast. And bear in mind that the person writing a morning line is not necessarily impartial. All I can do is use my experience over more than 60 years of involvement in political campaigns to describe a likely outcome of the campaign. And I am going to simplify this for those who are not used to using race track odds. Let’s even forget the percentages and talk seats in a 124-seat legislature. Because we use first-past-the-post voting, we actually have 124 elections going on and the results of those elections might be as follows:

Progressive Conservatives: 58 Seats.

The broad swath of rural ridings stretching from Ottawa to Windsor has seen little reason to leave their roots in conservatism. They might not really like Doug Ford and his fellow conservatives but many seem comfortable voting that way. Where the conservatives are losing votes as the ballots are counted is in the cities of Ontario and their suburbs.

Liberals: 37 Seats.

While some might scoff at the possibility of the liberals going from seven seats on dissolution to at least 37, it has happened before and is logical based on the anger many people feel about Mr. Ford’s conservatives and their mismanagement of the pandemic, the environment and general arrogance. The positive feeling about Mr. Del Duca of the liberals is that he is unlikely going to do any harm.

New Democratic Party: 26 Seats.

There are just too many seats that the NDP picked up from the liberals last time that are likely to return to their liberal leanings. What the NDP needs to learn is that offering the voters a smörgåsbord of promises leaves them with no concrete reason to support the party.

Green Party: 3 Seats.

I might be doing this just to be perverse but if the liberals and NDP think they could make a deal, they should also include Mike Schreiner and his Greens if he can get a few more elected. And maybe Doug Ford would learn a few things if he watched the governing process from the opposition seats.

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A Hapless Hepburn.

May 15, 2022May 14, 2022 by Peter Lowry

As a former Torontonian and a life-long Ontario resident, the Toronto Star is a tough habit to break. Like many readers, I have a difficult time reading much of Rosie DiManno. That reporter could see a raindrop and write 2000 words about it. My favourites are the political reporters. I, more often than not, will agree with a Chantal Hébert, Susan Delacourt, Martin Regg Cohn, Althia Raj or Bob Hepburn. And occasionally I might disagree. Today is Bob Hepburn’s turn in the penalty box.

And he needs to pay attention. In writing about politics, you have to run fairly fast to keep up with what is happening. You should not quote old polls this far into an election campaign. The polls at the beginning of this campaign were meaningless. Few voters really knew conservative Doug Ford, fewer knew much about the NDP’s Andrea Horwath and it was the rare person who knew anything about liberal Steven Del Duca.

But that is changing. Even the pollsters are admitting that the liberal party numbers are on the move. This is what a political campaign is about. It is a time when the politicians should listen and let the citizens speak. Even as a campaign manager, I would always spend an occasional afternoon knocking on doors and listening to voters. It is the only way I know to feel the campaign and where it is headed.

What worries me the most about Hepburn’s recent suggestion that Monday’s debate is make-or-break time for Del Duca is that Del Duca might listen to him. I would be especially concerned if Del Duca actually changed his approach in the debate on Monday. He has established an effective persona in this campaign and people are liking it. We know now that he is no braggart like Ford nor as confusing as Horwath. He is just a guy like you or me who wants to do a job for us. There might be some patchwork in the team behind him but, on the whole, they can help him do the job. All we have to do is pick the good ones and send them to Queen’s Park. They will work for us.

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Doug Ford’s Legacy.

May 14, 2022May 13, 2022 by Peter Lowry

The question was posed the other day as to what is Doug Ford’s legacy as premier of Ontario? It led to a lengthy discussion. In the end, the conclusion was that his legacy has been subsumed in the Coronavirus. COVID-19 showed us that Ford is a braggart and poorly suited to lead.

Our hospitals in Ontario are in a state of disrepair—thanks to Doug Ford. We are facing years of catching up in surgeries. We have exhausted and disparaged nursing staffs. We are in dire need of rethinking and rebuilding healthcare in Ontario.

Doug Ford’s failure to recognize that long-term care should not be a for-profit business caused many deaths during the worst of the pandemic. Instead of acting quickly to stem the deaths in facilities that shared part-time workers, Ford vacillated.

Mind you, Ford is often quick to say he will throw money at a problem. If it is a hospital, the money is coming. How many times does he have to tell you the money is coming, before something happens?

His bluffs were called when it came to schools. Not all children can learn remotely. They need the social environment of school to grow and learn. They need the help of a human teacher. And the scientists could not be put off in cleaning up the air in classrooms.

And Ford is no environmentalist. He rescued highway 413 from the discard box in Transport and sold his developer friends on buying up farmland around the proposed highway interchanges. It did not worry him that the highway—from nowhere to nowhere—was through wetlands that helped make the area ideal for farming. Nor did it matter to him that the highway paralleled highways 401 and 407 and was not needed.

That Ford is a cheapskate has certainly been proved. He is nickel-diming the voters with a nickel off the provincial gas tax—if they vote for him. He took the tolls off two of the shortest new highways in Ontario—that connect the tolled 407 highway to the overcrowded 401.

The conclusion will be that Ontario has already tired of Mr. Ford.

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Liberalism Reborn.

May 11, 2022May 10, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It seems that the conservative and new democrat party leaders in Ontario are fighting a liberal party that no longer exists. They think they are fighting the Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGinty era liberals. They are not.

I was never a fan of Kathleen Wynne as premier. McGinty might have been dull but he was progressive and he moved the province forward. Yet Kathleen Wynne was overly cautious and she always tip-toed into reform. I thought that her opening up alcohol sales in grocery stores was the stupidest, slowest reform in the province’s history. I used to groan when she held another news event as she drew out the process.

And whatever Gods replaced Kathleen Wynne with Doug Ford as premier had a sick sense of humour. Doug is not just a loud-mouthed braggard, he is incompetent. His pushing the previously rejected highway 413 looks to me like one of the most corrupt acts by an Ontario government in the past 100 years. Not only do we not need this highway but we desperately need to keep the good farmland and we desperately need to keep the wetlands that the area needs to remain fertile and producing food for us.

And anyone who thinks Ford brought us through the pandemic unscathed was not paying attention. Ford got us on that on-again-off-again routine of mask mandates and closures. He set us up for a foul-up. He angered people and left us with a hard core of belligerents, running around the province, fighting mask mandates and other rules needed to protect people from the spread of COVID.

But the point of this blog is to tell you that there is something different in the air than the Coronavirus. There is an opportunity here in Ontario. I have been checking ridings across Ontario that I know and are likely to change in this election. Reading the biographies of some of the liberal candidates in those ridings is encouraging. I think we are going to see a lot more than just seven liberals at Queen’s Park after June 2. I think you are going to see a better breed of liberal. These people are progressives. They are not going to sit back and wait for things to happen. I think we are going to like them.

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The Motivated Voter.

May 10, 2022May 9, 2022 by Peter Lowry

If there is one voter who drives the pollsters and political parties crazy, it’s the motivated voter. This is the voter that will get to the polling station and vote at the first opportunity. They hardly need a phone call to remind them or a ride to the polls. They know why they are voting and it is usually against. In this particular election in Ontario, it is against that blowhard, Doug Ford.

And, as a pollster, if you don’t know why that particular voter is motivated, you are not doing the job. Someone who has an automated telephone system call you and just ask who you will be voting for is a jerk. Not only do children often answer the family telephone but even adults just press the most convenient button to get rid of the call. It is called interactive voice response (IVR). It is the cheapest form of polling—and probably the least reliable.

Let me ask you this: If you are a nurse working in a hospital in Ontario, who do you think you would be motivated to vote against? If you work in long-term care, who would you be motivated to vote against? If you are a public-school teacher in Ontario, who would you be motivated to vote against? I can think of a few more categories but I am sure you get the idea. And these are all Ontario voters motivated to vote against Doug Ford and the conservatives.

Mr. Ford and his conservatives have discouraged many voters. The problem for the pollsters is that most voters cannot identify opposition leader Andrea Horwath, let alone the will-o’-the-wisp liberal leader Steven Del Duca. And if you want to be sure of your vote against someone, you need to know who to vote for.

Personally, I would never vote for an NDP candidate in my riding. Andrea Horwath has led her party nowhere. I was trying to check on a problem in her Hamilton riding regarding one of the hospitals and was advised by her Queen’s Park office to call her riding office in downtown Hamilton. I tried that number and the person I was helping in Hamilton repeatedly called that number. It was always busy. It was busy to the point that you expect the staff is tired of answering for her. Those lines must be off the hook.

You should find out about the liberal candidate in your riding. We certainly need more liberals at Queen’s Park.

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