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Ontario election dilemma

Ontario’s having an election in a few, and I’d rather Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives not win the most seats. The main reason is that climate change remains our biggest problem, and this party has been and will continue to be terrible on the environmental front. We can’t really afford that for another four years. Not only are they not trying to reduce emissions, they really seem to want to increase them. Their main campaign point is that they more people in more cars on more highways, producing more greenhouse gases on the paved-over wetlands.

But, the PCs also weren’t great on (just off the top of my head):

  • Healthcare—Freezing wages, cutting public health
  • Long-term care—Failing to protect seniors in care (like, seniors died of starvation and neglect, not Covid…)
  • Autism—Cancelling the Liberal autism program because the wait list was too long, and replacing it with nothing but an even longer wait list
  • Opioid addiction—Arbitrarily capping the number of needle exchange centres in the province while overdose deaths soared
  • Open government—Paying lawyers to keep secret information citizens have the right to know, such as ministerial mandate letters and taxpayer-funded reports on municipal amalgamation
  • Municipal government—Cancelling the ranked ballot option (why?), changing the number of Toronto city councillors mid-election (!)

So, clearly I would like people to… well…. do what exactly?

Vote for a member of another party, of course. But that’s the issue: which one? This ain’t a two-party system. And none of the other main alternatives—NDP, Liberal, or Green—are clearly the best choice. At least to me, anyway. But I think to a lot of other people, also.

Which is why we have this split. A chunk who will vote PC, because you always have a minimum 30% or so who will, with the remaining majority of voters dividing up support in such a way that the PCs are well on track to win more seats than anyone. Quite likely a majority of seats overall, which will allow them to govern and do whatever the heck they want.

PCs at 36% vs Liberal at 28%, NDP at 24%, and Green at 5%.

The other parties should combine and stop this from happening

I keep hearing this, even now, from people whom, I guess, don’t really know how our political system works?

The election has started. The ballots are printed. Heck, people have already voted! It’s too late for the Liberals and NDP to collaborate and agree to split the ridings and govern as a coalition—which is not really how our system works anyway…?

In the end, after the vote, if the non-PC parties have, combined, more seats than the PCs, they could look to eventually defeat that government and indeed, offer to govern in some sort of partnership as an alternative to making everyone go to the polls again. But not before the vote.

(Also, you know, you can’t just assume that people who like the Liberals like the NDP second best and vice versa. If those parties were to collaborate ahead of time, it could well annoy loyalists into voting for some other party entirely…)

Strategic voting

Is the other big idea, and is at least is in realm of possibility (unlike the fantasy of an NDP-Liberal coalition forming mid-election campaign). But it’s not as easy as it seems, even despite all the tools and movements to help, such as https://votewell.ca/ and (for Toronto) https://www.notoneseat.ca/

The idea is that you vote for whichever party your riding is most likely to defeat the PC candidate.

The problem is that it’s largely based on polling at the local riding level, which is simply not accurate, mainly because it isn’t done! At least not on any mass scale. Polling is mostly done provincially, and then they try to extrapolate to the local level to estimate how the seat count will work out (considering historical data for that riding, etc.). It gives you an idea, but that’s it. It’s not really solid data.

Squaring my own circle

All I can 100% control is my own vote, so what are the considerations?

Party leader

My favourite for sure is Mike Shreiner of the Green Party. He’s smart, he’s likeable, he’s been a constructive presence in the Legislature the last four years, and in my opinion, he was the best at the Northern Ontario leaders debate (one of the better debates I’ve seen a while, actually).

Steven Del Duca (Liberal) and Andrea Horwath (NDP) also seem smart and reasonably likeable, but do somewhat lack in charisma. Del Duca was somewhat better in the debate, in my opinion, for what that’s worth.

Platform

If you look at my Vote Compass:

Liberal 73%, Green Pasrty 64%, NDP 63%, PC 43%

The Liberals have it.

But, I feel like each of these parties has some promises I really like, some that I’m meh about, and a few I’m not quite on board with but, overall, any one would be an improvement over the PCs.

Local candidate

The only local candidates I know anything about are incumbent Catherine Fife of the NDP, and Shefaza Esmail of the Green Party, whom I talked to briefly on the phone. I’ll have to nerd out and watch a local debate to see how the others are, but Catherine has been a good MPP: smart, engaged, well-spoken. At this point, she certainly seems like the best local option.

In sum

I have my own three-way tie: Green, Liberal, NDP.

If the election were held today…

I’d likely vote NDP, to support Catherine Fife, and because, despite my serious doubts about strategic voting… She still seems like the smart choice if you’re going to consider it at all.

(For what it’s worth, VoteWell has Waterloo pegged as more of a Liberal / NDP battleground, and says you can therefore vote for “the candidate you prefer”. I dunno. Last time the PCs did come in second, but that was also the Great Liberal Collapse election, so… Who knows. Strategic voting is a mug’s game.)

Anyway. Making up my own mind isn’t really the problem.

The problem is how to you chip away at the soft part of the 37% currently planning to vote PC, and try to get them to vote some other way?

… When you can’t even quite tell them what that other way should be…?

I do still love this ad…


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The Green Party sign on the lawn

Ontario is in the midst of a provincial election, as evidenced by the lawn signs popping up around town. In our neighbourhood, the PCs were out first, and I’m surrounded by them. The NDP were next; they’re further up the street. Haven’t seen too many Liberal. Then on my way home yesterday, I’m like hey, there’s a Green Party sign.

Then: Wait, that’s on my lawn.

They actually shouldn’t have done that. I get why they thought they could—because at some point in the past year or so, I donated to that party. So few people donate to political parties, I can understand them thinking that, for sure, it must mean that I plan vote Green.

Except that I’m that rare weirdo who will donate to a party just to encourage them, secure in the knowledge that I will get 75% of my donation back at tax time. If donating meant that you could automatically plant signs in my lawn, in some cases, I would have had three or four different parties’ signs on my lawn. But still only one vote.

signs-for-indecisive

Signs of the indecisive

The Greens didn’t ask me if it was OK for them to put a sign on my lawn. So I could by rights call them up and ask them to take it away. Or more simply, just take it out myself put it in my garage.

Having it out there feels like a lie, as though I’m saying I plan to vote for this party, and you should too. When really, the only thing I’m sure of in this election, is that because of Doug Ford, I will not be voting PC, and I wish that others would not, either. But as to whom I or anyone else should vote for instead…? It’s a tough one.

This is a sentiment difficult to express with any lawn sign.

Voting in an Ontario provincial election is very simple: Using a pencil, you put your x beside the name of one candidate from one party (or an independent), and you’re done.

But it’s a fairly complex set of factors you have to consider when deciding where to put that x.

Which party has the best leader?

It’s unfortunate that in our parliamentary voting system, where each party leader is just another elected MPP, that leaders have such focus and importance. But that’s the way it is.

leaders.png

Provincial party leaders Doug Ford (PC), Kathleen Wynne (Liberal), Andrea Horwath (NDP), and Mike Schreiner (Green)

As I’ve said, I don’t think Doug Ford is qualified to be Premier. I don’t want to go on a big rant about it, so I’ll keep it to a little rant. His only political experience is a Toronto city councilor, where he was frequently absent, and always uninterested in learning the details of policy. Which is probably why the PCs are basically running without a platform. All evidence suggests he’d be a terrible Premier. (See: https://www.notdoug.com/)

“Vote for this guy, his worst ideas are so terrible the courts will save us from them and she’s just the worst” isn’t as novel a platform as it used to be and we’re already seeing how it plays out down south, but let’s give it another go up here. What could possibly go wrong?

Doug Ford’s politics of indulgence by Tabatha Southey

But who’s the best other option?

Would you rather vote for the incompetent incumbent, the profligate wildcard, or the fake conservative who refuses to show his work?

— Robyn Urback, being cynical

Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not on the “I hate Kathleen Wynn” train. The woman is impressive. She’s smart and decent and qualified. Here I’m going to quote Christie Blatchford, a conservative I often disagree with:

…it’s why the decision facing Ontario voters on June 7 is so freaking difficult — or rather, she’s why.

Kathleen Wynne is so clearly heads and tails smarter, better informed and more capable than Doug Ford that it borders on the ridiculous.

Smarter, more capable Kathleen Wynne

But, the NDP’s Andrea Horwath is having a good campaign. Last election she came off as angry and aggressive, and it was rather off-putting. (I also thought the NDP platform then was dumb.) This time, she’s sounding much more positive and putting herself across in a reassuring way. These Paul Wells assessment is probably fair:

She has richly earned a reputation for being one of the least exciting politicians in the land. But there is something fascinating in her old-fashioned willingness to answer a question in detail.

Just how far can Andrea Horwath go?

The Green’s Mike Schreiner suffers from being excluded from a lot of debates, so I suspect the average Ontarian knows nothing about him. But I’m again that sort of weirdo who will make the effort, and he also comes off well. Here’s a report from a forum he was allowed to attend [and how much do you love that they also included the None of the Above party?]:

Perhaps neophyte fringe candidate Paul Taylor, representing the None Of The Above Party, summed up Thursday’s night’s all-candidates forum best.

Seating arrangements on stage at the Italian Canadian Club had the affable Taylor sitting to the right of Green Party candidate Mike Schreiner’s, meaning Taylor had to repeatedly address a question after Schreiner’s energetic, precise and crowd-pleasing responses.

“Oh shit. I should have sat down there,” said Taylor motioning further down the table.

Schreiner led the pack at the first local public all-candidates forum. He has been campaigning for months, he is by far the most experienced of the bunch and he is well versed on the issues and his party’s stances on them.

Schreiner shines at first all-candidates forum

If I lived in his Guelph riding, I’d have no doubt about my vote. Or the appropriateness of a Green Party lawn sign.

But I don’t live in Guelph.

Who’s the best local candidate?

Individual MPPs don’t matter as much as I think they should, but that is who we are actually voting for. And in this case, I have an answer to the question: NDP candidate Catherine Fife. She is the current MPP, running for re-election. And she has always been an impressive politician: articulate, well-informed, charismatic. If the NDP did manage to be part of some sort of government, she’d likely be in Cabinet.

catherine-fife.png

I did hear a debate between her and the local Liberal and PC candidates, and the other two sounded good as well. Just not necessarily better than Ms. Fife.

As for the Green candidate, I have yet to catch a debate that includes him, and I know nothing about him. (Except that he puts out lawn signs without asking.)

Who’s most likely to beat the PCs in my riding?

This is the strategic vote angle. If all I’m sure about is that I’d rather not have a PC government under Doug Ford, then I should vote for whoever is most likely to beat that party.

And in this riding, no doubt that means voting for Catherine Fife of the NDP. Despite this not being a traditionally NDP riding, she’s managed to win the last two elections with margins of 7% to 8%. One of those was a by-election, but the other case she managed to win despite it being a fairly disastrous election for the NDP as a whole. This time the NDP  is so far polling much better than last time, making her the horse to bet on with your anti-PC vote.

Who has the best platform?

Oh yeah, that. Which party’s policies do I most agree with?

According to the CBC vote compass poll that I took, that would be… The Green Party of Ontario.

This blog post is already running to novel lengths, so I’ll just touch on three policy areas where the Greens impress.

Deficits

Not always a bad thing for a government to run deficits, but Ontario is in a bit of a precarious financial situation and none of the major parties are being honest about what that implies.

First of all, they are starting with numbers that are likely bogus, according to the Auditor General (see: Bad books: How Ontario’s new hydro accounting could cost taxpayers billions). Nevertheless, the Liberals plan to forge ahead with a number of new drug, dental, childcare, and mental health programs, along with a commitment to high-speed rail which (lovely as it sounds), just isn’t economically viable (see: Kathleen Wynne’s pledge to spend billions on a bullet train makes zero sense).

The NDP would do similarly things, but differently. Like drug plans for everyone, instead of only those of a certain age, but excluding those who have employee coverage. And not committing to high-speed rail. To pay for their commitments, they would increase taxes on the wealthiest and larger corporations, but that wouldn’t make much of a dent in the deficit.

The PCs? Their “plan” involves spending more (in certain areas) and reducing government revenue (lowering various taxes, getting rid of cap and trade). Oh, and they wouldn’t lay anyone off. How will they pay for that? Wave their hands and say, “efficiencies”, apparently. They unsurprisingly haven’t released any costing for this impossible plan. People sort of assume they care about the deficit, but there’s no evidence of it.

The Greens also support spending in new areas, but they at least have some proposals for how to pay for it: congestion taxes, parking levies, tobacco tax increases. “Even with a better range of public services, our projected deficit will be almost one third of the deficit projected by the Financial Accountability Office for the 2018 Ontario Provincial Budget. No other party has accounted for these higher budget deficits.” Source: Green Party platform

Hydro

Ontario’s hydro system has been mismanaged (mostly under Ontario’s previous premier) and a lot of people (not me so much, but) are angry about their higher utility bills. The Liberals, as already noted, are doing some accounting hocus-pocus to put off some hydro bills til later, even though that’s going to end up costing way more in the end. The NDP plans to bring Hydro One back into public hands, which may be is a good idea, but unlikely to be as easy to accomplish as they claim. The PCs will just lower rates, somehow. I don’t know, and I don’t believe they plan to undo the hocus-pocus.

The Greens, meanwhile, have a really specific idea: “Ontario can save $1.1 billion per year by closing the Pickering Nuclear station on schedule in 2018. We can replace high cost nuclear power with low cost water power from Quebec.” Is there something wrong this plan? I don’t know; they’re the Green party, nobody bothers to analyze their plans. But it certainly sounds more sensible than anybody else’s.

Marijuana

Canadian Senate permitting, marijuana will become legal this summer. The Liberal plan is to sell it only through government stores, à la LCBO, pushing out the small producers who have, for years now, supplying the product for medical marijuana users. The NDP have rightly criticized the very small number of stores the Liberals plan to roll out, but haven’t proposed a different approach. Doug Ford has mumbled something about supporting the free market there, but as always, without any details.

Whereas the Green Party were hot off the presses with an alternative plan to regulate and license small businesses to sell cannabis, way back in September.

Can you read the signs?

Clearly, I would like some sort of ranked ballot to better catch these nuances (and only the Greens support that). But in the current one-vote world? Three weeks to decide…

 


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Please save us, NDP, you’re our only hope

Given its persistence in my thoughts, apparently I need to write something about the strange goings-on in Ontario politics.

Setting the stage

To catch up people living elsewhere:

The Ontario Liberal Party is currently in power. It has formed the government since 2003—15 years. The official opposition is the Progressive Conservative (PC) party.

There is a provincial election in June.

With the Liberals, and leader Katherine Wynne, having persistently low approval ratings, the PCs appeared poised to win that election.

It was all kind of routine and dull. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But then the PCs decided to make it interesting

About four weeks ago, PC leader Patrick Brown was accused of sexual misconduct; specifically, of initiating intimate activity with women who were much younger (though of legal age), while they were inebriated. One of them worked for him.

Brown denied the accusations and vowed to stay on as PC leader. He was convinced to step aside by his staff, who resigned en massed, and by the rest of the PC caucus, who went on to elect Vic Fedeli as interim leader.

Fedeli then discovered serious problems within the PC party itself, including a sexual assault allegation against the president of the party and bogus membership numbers. There were more resignations.

The new PC party officers decided to have a quickie leadership convention, with a winner to be declared on March 10. Four candidates entered the race, include Doug Ford, brother of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford (gah!), and a woman (Tanya Granic Allen) who thinks children shouldn’t be learning anything about sex in school. (She was just endorsed by a white nationalist organization. That’s nice.)

Satirical take on Doug Ford’s leadership announcement. But he really did announce it in his mother’s basement, and he did used to be a drug dealer

And then last week, Patrick Brown came out swinging. He defended himself against the sexual misconduct allegations (including, in part, through statements from his girlfriend, 17 years his junior, whom he started dating when she was his intern. Umm…). He launched a defamation suit.

Oh, and he applied to be PC leader again, and has been allowed to run.

And then they blew up their platform

That Patrick Brown won the PC leadership in the first place was a surprise. He had been undistinguished backbench MP in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. But he won by getting a lot people to sign up as new members of the party to vote for him.

He ran for the leadership as being at least sympathetic to social conservative views, but as the election, he and his team gauged that to win Ontario, you had to be a bit more centrist. They came out with a platform to mostly… Keep doing what the Liberals had been doing. The only “radical” element was getting rid of the Liberal’s cap and trade system for carbon pricing, and instead adopt the federal Liberal’s carbon tax plan. They would use the greater revenues from that to reduce income taxes.

But one by one, all the PC leadership candidates have declared they will not support carbon taxes. And they are going to get rid of cap and trade, too. in Maclean’s, Mike Moffat outlines how Scrapping carbon taxes leaves a gaping hole in the Ontario PC platform. To not run a deficit, they’d have to cut spending by $16 billion instead of the originally planned $6 billion. And they simply won’t have any way to cut greenhouse emissions. Ontario just won’t.

people-s-guarantee-ontario-pc

So much for that….

Except, as National Post’s Andrew Coyne has pointed out, A carbon tax is coming, no matter what the PC candidates say. Because if they do cancel cap and trade, then the Federal Liberal government says they are going to impose a carbon tax on Ontario (and give the revenues back to the province). While it’s always possible the Federal government will backtrack on that plan, none of the PC candidates can personally make that happen. Whining alone will not do it.

And that’s one of the reasons Patrick Brown stepped back into the race, he says: To defend his platform. For the record, I do not believe his motivations are noble; I think he’s just very ambitious and really wants to be Premier. But he’s not wrong in saying that the policy void of the rest of the candidates is irresponsible.

Problem is, responsible policies will not win you the PC party leadership. Compared with the general population, the PC membership has a much higher percentage of people who hate carbon taxes in a deep, passionate, and irrational way, and cannot be convinced to accept them as policy, no matter (for example) how big an income tax cut you offer in return. Saying what you need to say to get past the members in March, then pivoting to become mainstream enough to win in June, is going to be a challenge for whoever wins this.

Which proves that having a tiny minority of the population with special interests select party leaders is ridiculous. Elected members of the party caucus should be the one to decide who leads them. Member vote has been the practice long time in Canada; there’s no real momentum to change that now. But if that time ever comes, this will be a textbook case as to why it’s needed.

So do the Liberals win again?

I’m not going to make that prediction. If nothing else, the PCs are gaining a ton more attention than they managed with Patrick Brown as uncharismatic leader, and the Liberals remain stubbornly unpopular. (That people say they actually dislike Katherine Wynne as a person is a puzzle to me, by the way. To me, she comes across very well, as knowledgeable, compassionate, and well-spoken. But maybe people are just tarring her with whatever Liberal policies they’re angry about.)

140304wynnec

Which seems to be mostly increased hydro rates? Although those date back to some bad contracts that previous Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty got us into, and that no party can get us out of. But the Wynne government has made some of their own bad decisions (along with some good ones, it has to be said): I’m not convinced that selling Hydro One was such a great idea. I’m not a fan of their LCBO-style plan for selling marijuana. Back-tracking on their promise to Toronto mayor John Tory in implementing tolls on the DVP and Gardiner was unconscionable. As is the amount of money they spend trying to get us to gamble more, online.

Overall, I think they could use a little time out here.

But I can’t see voting for that gong show of a PC party, either.

Our last hope? No, there is another

Ontario actually has a third party with seats in the legislature: The NDP.

Even before all this, I was leaning toward voting NDP. My MPP, Catherine Fife, is from that party and is a very good representative. She deserves to be returned to Queen’s Park.

But the party as a whole still seems to having trouble setting themselves up as a government in waiting. Even though they have the most popular leader. Even though the PCs are in a bit of a mess and people are tired of the Liberals. The NDP still seems to have trouble getting any attention, and keeping showing up third in “Who would you vote for” polls.

Could be a few reason for that, including having less money than the other parties, but they also seem notably light on the policy front. (Though what they have, on pharmacare and Hydro, seems sensible.) Maybe they should take a page from the Liberals, who have been known to crib from the NDP, and borrow some from other parties.

ndp-ideas.png

Horwath, Wynne, and Brown (this is an older cartoon….)

Like, the Ontario Green Party has some excellent policies, such as having small business dispensaries sell marijuana instead a government monopoly.  (Also, Ontarians should consider voting Green, at least anywhere they stand some chance, like in Guelph.)

And / or, how about if the NPD gets rid of cap and trade, happily accepts the Federal government carbon tax, and gives everyone an income tax cut?

For one thing, it would be hilarious to see them debate the PC leader on that. And the NDP isn’t going to get any of the “I hate carbon taxes” vote, anyway. They could even put an NDP spin on it, and make sure all low-income people got a carbon tax credit.

An NDP government in 2018?

Look, it’s a long shot, it definitely is. But the past four weeks have shown that nothing in Ontario politics is as predictable as we’d thought.

 

 


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Some quick ones

Other issues have been getting in the way of blogging lately. Let’s see if I can cover a few items with some brevity (not always my strong suit).

Politics: NDP leadership

It’s been interesting to read the views on Thomas Mulcair, but I haven’t formed my own opinion of him yet. Me, I liked Nathan Cullen. To the point where I was almost wishing I had joined the NDP, just so I could vote for him.

Politics: Robocalls

Yep, I’m still following this issue pretty closely and may rant more about it later. In the meantime I will say that Rick Mercer’s 2-minute rant this week summed it up nicely for me. The MPs themselves don’t really know what happened, but someone does. Several someones, higher up. We know it’s rotten. We know the government won’t investigate itself, but someone must.

Rick suggests the G-G. I don’t have much faith that he would do; he’s really not the shit-disturber type, which is probably why Harper picked him. Still, I don’t have a better suggestion. And like Rick, I want to something to happen on this, and sooner rather than later.

 

Books: What not to read

On fairly short notice, we ended up having to take a somewhat long road trip. So I tried to find an audiobook. A novel called Mine Are Spectacular! looked kind of fun, and had pretty good reviews.

People, it was so ridiculous. It was intended, I think, as a kind of wish fulfillment novel for middle-aged women. Everyone was rich, richer, and richest, and their was no end to the designer labels being dropped into the prose, as though every paragraph had a sponsor. We started mockingly repeating each as they went by: Louis Vuitton! Gucci! Dolce Gabana!

And though not that old (2006), it seemed so dated. AOL buddies. The cutting-edge concept of metrosexuals. And frankly, all that reveling in the luxury goods, which seemed a bit wrong, post-recession.

And then there was Kurt. Gorgeous, smart, successful, (rich!) Kurt, in his 20s, who nonetheless has so little life of his own that, of course, all he wants to do is hang out with a bunch of women in their 40s. He’s what “the girl” usually is in action movies–a bit of eye candy for our heroines, who has no apparent existence outside of them.

Food: New ways to drink ice wine

We did the Niagara-on-the-Lake thing recently. Like a lot of people, we kind of like ice wine, but it is so thick and so sweet, we don’t really drink it that often.

But on this trip we purchased a wine that was a mix of Riesling and ice wine. The result was a sweet wine, but one that was much less thick and sweet. Much more approachable.

Then at a wine pairing dinner we went to, we were served sparkling wine—with a dash of ice wine in it. That made for a slightly off-dry sparkling (reminiscent of Peller Estates’ Ice Cuvee) that went really nicely with the pumpkin soup.

That got us thinking that we could do our own blending here. A touch of ice in a cabernet franc. Our own blend of ice cuvee with some other sparkling wine. You know? So that bottle of ice doesn’t just sit for months in your fridge after you’ve had your one glass of it.