The union group, working under the euphemism of ‘Working Families’ in the 2011 provincial election, was not helping our democracy. The group was interfering in it. The more than $2 million the teachers and nurses’ unions spent was a crude attempt to get around our election rules.
The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled last week that the union group was not an Ontario Liberal Party front. That was not the point. Nobody cared whose front it was. The point was that it was an unfair attack on a political party. You cannot be expected to get into a fist fight and stay within Marquess of Queensbury rules when some stray dog joins in the fight and starts taking a chunk out of your ass.
Any reader of this blog will confirm that the writer carries no brief for Tiny Tim Hudak’s Ontario Conservatives. Far from it.
But fair is fair. Nobody was paying that kind of money to tell voters what a wus Dalton McGuinty is. Nor was any group wasting money telling people what they thought of Andrea Horwath and her Ontario New Democrats. If politicians want to spend their money on scurrilous attack advertising, that is within the rules. It is fair because under the spending controls in the election, the attacked party has similar spending limits and can answer or not as the party wishes. What a political party does not have is unlimited spending to deal with every crackpot who comes along and wants to say something nasty about the party. Nor should the party have to deal with this from what are supposed to be non-combatants.
If you have $2 million to spend on an election and it is that important to you, you should be running in the election. You really should not be standing at the sidelines, trying to trip players from teams you do not like.
As any Tim Hortons’ server can tell you, some people like their coffee black and some want a double, double. That is what an election is about. The voters get to tell the politicians what they want. We always hope beyond hope that voters have enough positive opinions of our party to get their approval.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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