It has not been a well kept secret. The Queen’s Park Whigs are worried. They cannot seem to understand why Ontario voters like New Democrat Andrea Horwath more than the Whig’s Wynne. And if they do not figure it out soon, the Whigs days are numbered.
Ontario has now had a year of Kathleen Wynne and people are losing patience. Starting with the corrupted and undemocratic delegated convention that chose this Premier, she has stumbled from day one in the job. What it boils down to is that she is unable to connect with voters. Her first answer to any problem is to appoint another group to study it. And when she takes direct action, she usually gets it wrong.
Take a recent example: the grocery cards fiasco in Toronto. It was a classic example of bureaucratic bungling. The Premier does not seem to understand the people in the city where she lives. She wanted to make sure that people who lost electrical power because of the ice storm were at least partially compensated for some of the food going bad in their fridges and freezers. That was an honest concern after Loblaw’s Weston showed the way.
But she put bureaucracy in the way. She had no idea of the numbers of people who would think they deserved something, She created the frenzy because she did not know to leave distribution of food to people who do it for a living: at the grocery stores. All the provincial government needed was to create an affidavit of loss for claimants to sign—that the bureaucrats could spend next summer checking.
Frankly, Kathleen Wynne seems to think like a bureaucrat. If she even likes people, she fails to show it. She treats the Premier’s job as an administrative function instead of a caring function. She lacks the talent to lead. She lacks political savvy.
Nobody thinks that Andrea Horwath of the New Democrats is any smarter. It is just that Wynne comes up looking like a dried up prune beside Horwath. The real difference is that people are starting to realize Horwath cares.
When you line up the three party leaders in Ontario, Horwath is coming across as the tortoise plodding her way to the finish line. The two hares, Timmy Hudak and Kathleen Wynne keep stirring the dust but going nowhere. At least the voters have figured out that Timmy Hudak is a loser but they are not getting any warm fuzzies from Wynne either.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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