A commentary in the Toronto Star on the recent Ontario election written by a member of Kathleen Wynne’s election team is puzzling. The article is by Tim Murphy, a partner at the law firm of McMillan LLP. A former Liberal MPP when Bob Rae was NDP premier and then chief-of-staff to Paul Martin during his brief tenure as prime minister, you would expect Murphy to have learned something about the political centre. Yet he claims that Kathleen Wynne won election based largely on her positioning the Ontario Liberals as the “voice of the activist centre.”
Since the political centre is a hypothetical point between the austere libertarianism of the conservative right and the supposed free-spending activism of the socialist left, it is difficult to envisage the mid point as being anything other than the point where you do nothing. We have certainly had governments that did that.
Murphy refers to the Liberal budget that was rejected by the New Democrats to launch the provincial election as the Liberal manifesto. You would think it contained enough social activism to qualify as left wing. It was hardly a do-nothing budget.
Nor was the Liberal Party campaign a lot of do-nothing promises. If any party ran a do-nothing campaign in that election, it was the New Democrats. In fact many of the media pundits were aghast to see the NDP seemingly moving to the right of the Liberals—heading for the do-nothing centre.
And yet Murphy describes the policies of the Wynne government as a new centre. It certainly came across to Ontario voters as a left-of-centre stance. The Liberal’s targeted employment support was a basic direction that contradicted the Conservative tax cut strategy as well as their ill-considered plan to reduce the number of civil servants. And then there is the Liberal’s new pension plan that is directed at the need to upgrade the Canada Pension Plan. This is social activism not centrist.
Murphy’s effort to promote the fiction of the Liberal Party straddling the middle of the political spectrum comes across as sophistry and misdirection. He must have learned it when working for Paul Martin. Martin has always believed in the dictum that you campaign from the left and govern from the right. If Murphy thinks this is the Wynne government’s angle, we can only hope he is in for a disappointment. The problem with that strategy is that it does not work. If voters want conservative governance, they can always vote for the Conservative Party.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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