Ontario’s Liberals and NDP failed miserably at their job: Selley

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Some of us thought Doug Ford might be playing with fire by calling an election in the middle of a crisis — especially since it was so obvious for so long that he (or at least some of his senior advisers) had been eager for any pretext to go early.

Either there wasn’t any fire, or the opposition parties utterly failed to harness it.

The news outlets called it eight minutes after the polls closed: A third PC majority.

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Ford said he needed “a strong, stable, four-year mandate that will outlive and outlast the Trump administration,” and to the extent “mandates” mean anything in parliamentary democracies, he has that. It’s a remarkable achievement: The last person to win three straight majorities at Queen’s Park was Ford’s Progressive Conservative predecessor, Leslie Frost, in the 1950s. No one has won four since Ontario was a de-facto two-party system.

It’s especially remarkable since the last time a pollster inquired after the popularity of Canada’s premiers, in December, the Angus Reid Institute found just 34 per cent of respondents approved of Ford — less than any of his colleagues.

Yet hardly anyone landed a glove on him in a month of campaigning. Amid the forthcoming recriminations, this may come to be seen as a remarkable achievement in itself.

It stood to reason that health care might be the Tories’ Achilles’ heel, if they had one. They promised to “end hallway medicine” seven years and two elections ago, and as Crombie repeatedly and pithily observed, they “didn’t get it done.”

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In September, based on data released through access-to-information, provincial news site The Trillium reported “nearly 2,000 patients per day on average (in January 2024) were kept in unconventional spaces in hospitals across the province” — “unconventional space” being the charming pseudonym for “using a chamber pot in a public hallway.”

That number was the highest since Ontario Health began collating data in 2017, and it well after COVID-19 had knocked the system on its keester. Ford’s plan to fix primary health care after seven years — the state of which is directly connected to the state of our emergency rooms — landed mere hours before the election was called; he only appointed Dr. Jane Philpott to head up that plan in October.

In the final days of the campaign, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ford inveighed against Ontarians who go to hospital for minor ailments. “Fifty per cent of the people shouldn’t be in (there),” he said, citing an unnamed ER doc as his source for that figure. “You got a little scrape on your knee or whatever, they should be at a clinic down the street.”

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This was a brave gambit, considering many people lucky enough to have signed on with a family doctor are contractually prohibited from seeking care at unaffiliated walk-in clinics — a leading absurdity of “universal health care” in Ontario..

But look at what pollster Leger found in a survey for Postmedia, released 10 days ago. After seven years of, shall we say, very mixed results, Ford was essentially tied with Crombie as the party leader respondents felt was best qualified to improve health care — 23 per cent for Ford, 22 per cent for Crombie.

“I don’t know (who would be best)” was way out in front at 36 per cent.

Indeed, on six of the nine issues Leger presented, the number of respondents who said they didn’t know which leader would do best exceeded the number who chose any of the actual leaders. The exceptions:

• On “growing Ontario’s economy,” Ford pipped “I don’t know” 37 per cent to 36, with Crombie a distant third at 16 per cent.
• On reducing gridlock, Ford was in front at 41 per cent, with “I don’t know” in second at 38 per cent and the Liberals barely registering at 12 per cent.
• And on “defend(ing) Ontario’s interests from aggressive U.S. trade and economic policies,” Ford’s unabashed anti-Trump rhetoric and “Captain Canada” persona seem to have done the trick: 45 per cent felt Ford was the right person for the job, with “I don’t know” at 32 per cent and the others at just 22 per cent combined.

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Polls suggested the economy writ large (which certainly includes gridlock), and the threat of a bedlamite American president messing with said economy were very much top of Ontarians’ minds. Federally, at least now, that seems to be favouring the incumbent party: Polls are narrowing between the Conservatives and Liberals. That may well have happened in Ontario as well, especially given the central problem with this election: The frankly ludicrous lack of disagreement between parties on the major issues listed above.

What do we do about the economy? Spend, spend, spend! What do we do about Trump? Fight, fight fight! Retaliate with our own tariffs! Protect dairy farmers above all others!

What do we do about gridlock? Ford says let’s build new highways, including his quixotic tunnel-under-Highway-401 plan. The opposition parties say, in essence, “don’t build new highways, and your tunnel plan is crazy,” and it shouldn’t be surprising if that didn’t grab commuters by the lapels and shake them.

If the opposition really believed in the evils of induced demand — the phenomenon whereby gridlock expands to fill the space available to it — then they would support tolls, congestion charges and other forms of road pricing. But no one at Queen’s Park will touch that with a 10-foot democracy pole, and they would probably screw up the sales pitch even if they dared try.

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There’s another very basic problem here, too: Even after seven years, Ford’s Progressive Conservative party lives rent-free in the heads of the Liberals and NDP. They consider Ford, quite simply, ultra vires. They don’t understand why people vote for him. They think it’s bananas, and at some point people will realize that.

On Wednesday, with the fight lost and the last press conference over, the Liberals accused Ford of taking “his private jet” to Miami for two hours and 17 minutes, and to Cancun for 24 hours — during which time, he mysteriously unveiled the PC party platform in Toronto. It was a stupid, petulant lie (they were tracking a jet that he had chartered at times during the campaign but was also being rented by other clients, as well — as is typical with chartered private jets). And an unfortunate coda to a Liberal campaign that is now trying to cast its third-place finish Thursday night as a significant victory.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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