Ontario Election 2022

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Politicians have agency and it is their job to try to understand society and to try to use that knowledge to build support for their parties and for their policies.* If they aren't capable of at least trying to do that, if they would rather raise their hands up in surrender and bewail how hard it is to push against 'trends' beyond their control, then they were lousy politicians anyway and not worth crying over.

_{*Whatever else you can say of the Ford Brothers, they have been very good at doing that - are multi-ethnic industrial suburbs and sink estates natural territory for conservative politics? Certainly not, and yet just look.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That could easily just be a hubristic waste of resources though - not unknown in Canada!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It would be especially awful if there were some sort of precedent in Ontario's political history for this general situation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I believe it is traditional at this juncture for me to note that the record of constituency polling is not particularly good anywhere and that - usually - if you see one with particularly odd results it's because the poll is fit for lining bird cages and not much else.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Isn't that mostly just a comment on the fact that as the motivation ideology of the Liberal Party is Canadian Nationalism it isn't anchored to any particular domestic policy agenda and so anything that isn't obviously extreme¹ will seem 'like the sort of thing a Liberal government would do' precisely because a Liberal government could very easily do almost anything? Most NDP provincial administrations have been recognisably social democratic ones, including 'woefully incompetent' (Rae, BC in the 90s) and 'semi-forced liberalisation as a result of financial crisis' (Romanow)² varieties. The only real exception would be Dexter, but that's just because all Maritimes governments amount to much the same in practice, no matter the party label.

<sub>1. By Canadian standards.
2. It was always more Hawke-Keating than Rogernomics...</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The grimly predictable landslide. Still, the a clear second place finish (it's seats that matter) for the NDP, which positions them better for the future, but they'll need to change a few things to make anything of it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

For the NDP it's a bad result but the sort of bad result that leaves them as the only realistic viable alternative government, so may actually position them quite well in the medium term. Last time that happened in Ontario they won the next election. For the Liberals it's a complete catastrophe, a result that calls into question their relevance as a serious force in provincial politics. To an extent this means it's also 1999 with the roles of the opposition parties switched, except that it's a much bigger PC win.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Beaches-East York just loves being represented by a member of the third party in the legislature!

_{(Yes, yes, it was a very different area even twenty years ago, I'm aware of that. Still funny!)}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Though it does depend on which bit as some of those ridings don't have entirely clear predecessors. So a majority of the electorate of Hamilton East-Stoney Creek at the time of the creation of the riding lived in the former riding of Stoney Creek, which last elected a PC MPP in 1999.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think as far as the results in the Windsor area are concerned, it is overwhelmingly likely that issues relating to Covid were a factor given the importance of cross-border ties to the economy of the place. When something strange happens, Occam is often our friend.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Between Bisson running again despite not being able to campaign seriously due to 'nearly dying of a coronary' and Skinner running again here in '19 despite not being able to campaign seriously due to 'nearly dying of an infection after a difficult hip operation and being almost ninety', had it occurred to social democratic parties to, perhaps, not to run longterm incumbents no longer physically capable of actually campaigning?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I realize that it was a complete train-wreck of an administration, but why did the NDP have so many ministers without portfolio?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I realize that it was a complete train-wreck of an administration, but why did the NDP have so many ministers without portfolio?

They were without portfolio, but were junior ministers with explicit roles.

How big was the cabinet exactly?