The federal Liberals must be wishing that their interminable leadership race was as short as in Ontario. With less than three months and time off for Christmas and New Years, the Ontario leadership race feels like your typical stakes race. What is unusual is that all the horses are from the same stable and the real race is to be run over the next two weeks.
And the fix is on. If you seriously believe that this is a democratic exercise, we have some lovely marshland we can sell you up near Bancroft. The Liberal Party is trying desperately to convince you through the news media that this is a legitimate contest and that any of the carefully vetted seven candidates can be Premier of Ontario—no matter how briefly.
While there might be a potential 1700 delegates elected from the 107 electoral districts in the province, these will not necessarily be the best or brightest of Ontario Liberals. The election process to be a delegate to the convention is a crap shoot. The voting process is based on a form of proportional representation according to the choice of candidate by people who know little or nothing about them And, since that type of voting is unlikely to produce an immediate winner with anywhere near 50 per cent of the vote, we get a noisy Saturday afternoon January 26 of ballots for the news media to watch delegates pick the candidate already chosen by the party’s de facto leaders.
The de facto leaders of the party are the more than 800 potential ex officio delegates to the convention. These are the Members of the Legislature, former members, recent Liberal candidates, table officers, riding presidents and other worthies and lowly elected Liberal delegates are expected to listen to them. And these worthies have one common goal: keep the party in power.
There will be much sign waving and chanting at the convention and much to cheer about. It will be an appropriate show. No doubt many of the luncheons and meetings of candidates and the inner members of their campaign teams will be discussing these and other matters in the run up to the January 25 start of the convention.
MPP Kathleen Wynne is supposedly in the lead with reportedly more than 1500 potential delegates pledged to support her on the first ballot. She will be very lucky to have even a third of that number elected. We believe that Sandra Pupatello with a potential of about 1200 delegates will get about 500 of them elected and lead on the first ballot. Seeing the figures that the party has seen fit to release, there is no reason to change any of the figures we published last week under the morning line.
Liberals who bother to show up to vote at their local delegate selection meetings this weekend will be following their own opinions. It is a secret ballot.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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