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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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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