This is an important time to be an Ontario liberal. It is not just the time to take on a new leader, it is a time to pick the direction the party will take into the near future. It is the time to decide what kind of a party the liberals want and the Ontario voters need. We can go the down the middle of the road to oblivion or we can rev-up and give Ontario the type of pro-active, progressive leadership that it desperately needs.
What scares me the most about this current leadership race was Bonnie Crombie’s statement that she thought Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne were too far to the left. Bonnie is still young and might not realize that the Ontario liberals have not had a left-wing leader in the last 60 years.
When Kathleen Wynne knew that Ontario voters were tired of all the restrictions on alcohol, she launched a painful process of cautionary expansion almost one super grocery store at a time. It became a joke. It sure was not progressive. It was the reluctant approach of a grandmother.
Mr. Ford might be a bully, a braggart, and a ham-handed conservative. He might be a lot of things that people dislike but the bastard gets the job done, as he sees it, and he has a large cohort of voters that agree with him. I think he, and people like him, are taking us into a world of wild fires, tornadoes, floods and ruined crops. They are careless and not thinkers. They are trying to patch social problems without caring to understand the causes or potential remedies.
We need strong, effective, progressive liberals to lead Ontario and Canada down a better path. Ontario needs to be showing how we can meet the needs of a changing environment. We have to find solutions to building durable homes for more people. We have to have the good farm land needed to feed us and others around the world. We have to have the clean energy needed for our industries and homes and transportation. We need to make sure our children have a better education, better trades training and better retraining as needed to meet increasingly complex needs.
The needs of our citizens are far too great for a laissez-faire approach to politics. We need to be pro-active. We need to be there for future generations. Liberals can do that.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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