Ontario Election 2022

[adma]

I agree about that kind of universal-swingism being a crock.  However, it does touch upon how the '18 Ontario election was much more "UK-like" in that there really was a "Labour vs Lib Dem" dynamic going--and in that sense, the ridings you mention are definitely much more *Lib Dem* than their surroundings, when it comes to strategic anti-Ford options.  So if the OLP are destined to remain a Lib Dem-ish 3rd party (which they already are in seat numbers), they probably *would* be hyperfocussing upon the Oakvilles and Mississauga-Lakeshores. 

Remember that there's 2 potential Liberal identities--the big-tent macro-identity, and the more "left option where NDP's not viable" micro-identity.  (Which'd also presuppose that the NDP might/should/ought to have the infrastructure to actually be viable in Mississauga, the way they are in Burnaby or Surrey.  Yeah, easier said, etc.  That's how presumptions that Ford has this election in the bag come to roost)

The "UK-like dynamic" was certainly there in 2018, but it wasn't that clear-cut. Just in the 416, there were some "Lib Dem"-type ridings like DVW, Eglinton Lawrence, St. Paul's, where the Libs did well, but they also had good numbers in lower-income Liberal strongholds - Scarborough-Guildwood, York South-Weston, Humber River-Black Creek, and DVE come to mind.

Outside the 416, Liberals were relatively strong in more "bourgeois professional class" places like Mississauga Lakeshore, Oakville, Orleans, etc. But they still did pretty well in the likes of St. Catharines, Peterborough-Kawartha, Ottawa-Vanier, and the Thunder Bay ridings, which have more of a "Labour" demographic than "Lib Dem" (Orleans and Ottawa-Vanier are weird though, a lot of their loyal Liberalism comes from the francophone presence - but certainly there is a notable class difference between those two ridings).

The common thread between the ridings where the Libs did well were strong incumbents. Indeed, Wynne's last minute gambit of "I'm not going to be premier" might have helped those incumbents. That factor won't be present in this election.

I guess you're right that if the Liberals were to resign themselves to being the third-place party in OnPoli, they'd do well to go for the "Lib Dem" niche, which neither the Tories nor the NDP have a natural appeal to. But I think the OLP would be really stupid to limit themselves like that when they're basically neck-and-neck with the NDP in the polls

Which is why I didn't couch my "Lib Dem" analysis in terms of concrete recommendation--more as a combination of "worst case scenario/low end realism" (a la what's traditionally guided the NDP in *its* 3rd-party-marginal years) and as a second-guessing of the logic behind those doing the projecting.  Which also has its echoes in various low points in other provinces (i.e. Manitoba, where they're a provincial rump viably confined to River Heights-type places, a few Lamoureux-type mavericks, and sometimes Francophone St Boniface), or the way the federal Libs *looked to be* going in some eyes after the '11 Iggy disaster, as opposed to where they actually *did* go under Justin.  So if there's a Lib Dem analogy, it's more w/where the Lib Dems had come by the Kennedy/Clegg cusp when they were still firmly 3rd party at least when it came to seat potential, but a whole lot of weird random "next tier up" looked within reach.

Under the circumstance, I don't see a lot of the "good numbers" situations you list as being good *enough*, as opposed to vestigial from long-term or incumbent advantage--3rd place in HRBC and YSW could just as well be read as being on a down-periscope trajectory, and hanging on in Scarborough-Guildwood might be seen as more of an exceptional "Sarah Teather" thing.  DVE is also more "middle" than "lower" in overall profile (i.e. not precisely as far down the bourgeois-professional road as DVW, but simply not "Tory" or "Dipper" enough to counteract the "safe middle"), while even St Kitts & Peterborough have their bourgeois/professional undercurrent through being central-city ridings with a campus/educated-class element.  And both Francophone and TB could be argued in terms of "Celtic fringe" exceptionality.

So again: as I said, *if* '18 were not only reflective of, but foretelling of, a Lab vs Lib Dem dynamic (and "foretelling of" is what knocks some of those '18 "good numbers" out of the picture).  But *also*, as I indicated, it'd require the ONDP to actually have a stronger Labour-esque machine in place; and there's no evidence so far that the NDP's poised to Orange Crush the non-Lakeshore Mississauga seats, which is *really* what's required if the OLP is truly in eclipse and the PCs have any chance of defeat.  Yet if one went through '18's figures w/a fine-toothed comb, one could surmise some of these "paths potentially followable", regardless of whether the parties in question are up to it.  (Plus, monkey-in-the-middle political forces like Lib Dems are notoriously difficult to account for through conventional "swing projection"--a lot of 2010's most bone-headed UK prognoses came through misreadings of Lib Dem strength due to redistribution-skewed notional 2005 figures.)

[adma]

You make a good point, if the Ontario Liberals are really destined for third place in Ontario, their best might be the Lib Dem coalition of brahmin liberals and unique minorities like Francophones, along with places where they have strong local organizations. I just have a hard time seeing that as a necessity, because the Liberal brand is still a strong one in Ontario. The Ashdown/Kennedy/Clegg formula for Lib Dem seats came about after many decades of playing third fiddle to the Tories and Labour, and like you mentioned, Labour always being able to finish comfortably in second when they lost elections. The NDP is not there yet in Ontario, and may never be, so the Grits should still put in the effort to go for more Labour-esque voters in this year's election.

And there's an additional Ontario constituency that doesn't neatly fall into the UK dynamic, i.e. that which Del Duca once represented and may well bid for again--the "York Region ethnoburb", the kind that in UK terms would be too aspirational for Labour, too polyglot for the Tories, and too un-Brahmin for the Lib Dems, and whose present park within the PC camp still feels more conditional than permanent-condition...

[adma]

And there's an additional Ontario constituency that doesn't neatly fall into the UK dynamic, i.e. that which Del Duca once represented and may well bid for again--the "York Region ethnoburb", the kind that in UK terms would be too aspirational for Labour, too polyglot for the Tories, and too un-Brahmin for the Lib Dems, and whose present park within the PC camp still feels more conditional than permanent-condition...

True, but Ford's Ontario is a different context. UK Tories are more nativist than Canadian (especially Ontarian) Tories, so the "too polyglot for the Tories" isn't as big a factor. In 2018, York was the quintessential Ford Nation region. Some of their strongest numbers were in York Region, Tory support in York RM was comparable to rural counties like Dufferin and Huron.

And it's that "quintessential Ford Nation" quality that underpins how it all still feels more conditional than permanent-condition--even if, unlike Ford's Etobicoke North, it's still likely to be *viable* in Ford's absence.

[adma]

He *might* have family E of the Humber--in Ward 17 (the N part of Davenport, adjacent to YSW), one Ben Stirpe (NB "Stirpe" is Michael Ford's actual surname of birth) ran for Council and finished 4th w/5%, and he openly boasted of his endorsing Rob Ford for Mayor on his signs.

There's something about this move that really feels like a throwback to "Doug Ford the electoral dirtbag"--it's just hard to tell how much weight it carries, in a provincial riding like this, in a second-term Premier Ford era.  (Like, it feels very "2010's" a move at this point)

[adma]

Not sure why Yarde lost, but I was surprised the party didn't chose a Sikh candidate last time in the first place. I guess Sandeep Singh was able to get a lot of the Sikh community to sign party memberships to win.

Yeah, given the nature of the riding, it sounds like ethno-politics more than anything.

Great news about Wong-Tam. Every time we get a by-election in Toronto Centre, I always float her name as the only person who could win the seat for the NDP. Let's see if that can ring true (though, in a wave general election, her personal popularity might not be enough)

Actually, re "only person", I've been of the thought that Suze Morrison could have won again even if the NDP were once again relegated to firm third-party status--and in an odd way, *her* record in office serves as a good foundation for KWT; that is, she gave the brand a longer-term credibility in a riding where they've been historically federally and provincially marginalized by the Libs.  (Yes, the last redistribution helped; but Morrison's proved to be the perfect rep for said redistributed entity)

[adma]

I did not know Yarde doesn't live in the riding.  Where does he live, weird that he would have contested the riding in the first place, no?  Brampton North is a little less demographically "South Asian" than Brampton East, so I don't think there is as big of a need for a South Asian candidate as there would be in Brampton East. I find the optics don't look great, even if it may help the ONDP maintain the riding. For the rest of us looking in, a competent Black man was essentially "booted" from the party, and Andrea felt no need to intervene.  Not great optics.

It may be a little less *demographically* South Asian; but it's within that community that, overwhelmingly, the riding's NDP "machine" lies.  Everything else is kind of along for the ride.  (For proof, look at the 2014 surprise-2nd figures in Brampton-Springdale--the NDP did *overwhemingly* well in the Springdale part.)

[adma]

Whatever the cause of the weird situation in Brampton North, it may not matter much in the end. It's far too early to be making predictions, but if current poll numbers hold, it's hard to see the NDP holding Brampton North. I imagine both the Liberals and Tories are targeting it.

One might as well write off Brampton Centre as well in the process, maybe even Brampton East.  Though it depends, of course, on *which* current poll numbers (i.e. some are more palpably NDP-3rd than others) or what the state of the campaign-mode Libs will be (although as far as "targeting" goes, they *are* running their former office-holder in Brampton North, which may be a virtue even if she finished a distant 3rd in '18).

[adma]

Whatever the cause of the weird situation in Brampton North, it may not matter much in the end. It's far too early to be making predictions, but if current poll numbers hold, it's hard to see the NDP holding Brampton North. I imagine both the Liberals and Tories are targeting it.

One might as well write off Brampton Centre as well in the process, maybe even Brampton East.  Though it depends, of course, on *which* current poll numbers (i.e. some are more palpably NDP-3rd than others) or what the state of the campaign-mode Libs will be (although as far as "targeting" goes, they *are* running their former office-holder in Brampton North, which may be a virtue even if she finished a distant 3rd in '18).

I think Brampton East is likely to stay NDP regardless. It's the most left-wing and NDP-friendly of the Brampton ridings, and Gurratan Singh is well-known - not to mention, his brother used to represent this neck of the woods back when the NDP were third-place. There will be Liberals "returning home" from the NDP all over Ontario, but probably not as much in Brampton East where, for the majority of centre-left voters, NDP has been home for over a decade.

I still think of it as a be-forewarned asterisk case due to the special nature of Ford Nation--which is why, plus the fact that Gurratan is not Jagmeet, the NDP in '18 notionally fell 6 points and the PCs gained something like 20 points from '14.  And the "growth areas" are the ones where Tories have done most "promisingly".  So if we're facing a generic NDP-leakage circumstance and, who knows, the Ford Tories building upon '18, this could fall victim to, yes, the unfortunate vote-split if Libs are bottom-feeding and repatriating their vote *everywhere*, indiscriminately.

And as for Brampton North, there's actually not *that* much of a gap btw/it and Brampton East when it comes to NDP viability, and that's because the Springdale (aka "Singhdale") part is really part of the Brampton East S Asian continuum.  And it's why the NDP was *already* 32% and only 8 points behind the Libs in the former Brampton-Springdale in '14 (the "old normal" was in '11, when they were a distant 3rd at 15%).

As for Brampton Centre, yeah. I'm not sure how popular Sara Singh is locally, but she didn't win by a huge margin in 2018, and there's a more firm Tory base in Brampton Centre than the other Brampton ridings (as can be seen in federal elections).

Actually, the firmest Tory base is in Brampton South, which contains the heart of old-stock Old Brampton, home of the late Premier Davis--it's the only one of the Brampton ridings which, notionally, would have been 2nd place PC in '14.

When it comes to impressions of a "Tory base": keep in mind that the deceptively named Brampton Centre is mainly the heart of Bramalea, which once might have had "New Town Labour" as a natural condition (suppressed due to traditional NDP weakness in the suburban GTA; but in the '90 Bob Rae election, voters in Bramalea opted for NDP, except that Bramalea was split into 2 ridings that marginally opted for the Libs instead).  And when it comes to federal elections in the 90s, Bramalea-Gore-Malton's election of Liberal Gurbax Malhi as the first turbanned Sikh MP '93 *really* skews the picture--it led still-predominantly-WWC Bramalea to vote Reform or PC in abnormally high numbers out of racialized reaction.  It was a different Bramalea, a different time, when Sikhs-in-turbans were more like electoral kryptonite among "a certain bunch".  Perhaps out of a certain inertia, or out of the fact that the way Bramalea demographically "evolved" was more polyglot a la central Mississauga than Sikh/S Asian-driven a la Malton or Springdale, something of that rightish tendency endured into the c21--only now, it was "racialized" less out of reaction than out of Ford/Kenney big-tent embrace.  But it's still scarcely the sort of base that can be called "firm"--Bramalea remained Jagmeet's weakest part (and the PCs' strongest part) when his provincial riding included Bramalea, but that's more because of the nature of everything else within the riding than because of the nature of Bramalea...

[adma]

Most recent Mainstreet Poll: https://www.ipolitics.ca/dashboards/ontario

PC: 39.2
OLP: 25.8
NDP: 24.1
OTH: 7.5
GPO: 3.4

Seat projections:
PC: 76
NDP: 24
OLP: 9
GPO: 1
Toss-up: 14

I think the projections are a little too harsh on the Liberals, because as I've said before, 2018 isn't a good baseline year to project numbers from. But yeah, if the PCs are able to keep this much daylight between themselves and their opponents, a majority won't be a huge challenge.

Remember, though, that superficial "harsh on the Liberals" appearances are likely subsumed within the tossup column (though even there, I agree that straight projection methodology doesn't quite illuminate things).

Also, we're so far absent a campaign where voters can really *engage* to the leaders and what they have to offer.  But a forewarning about Ford being a notoriously gaslighty politician--that is, in his personal races or those involving his family (municially, at least), he can have a knack of making challengers look utterly irrelevant, like flies to be swatted away.  By that measure, you can picture him building on his seat lead so that inner-city rumps are all that are remaining of the opposition--that is, that entire toss-up number (if not the specific seats deemed toss-up) collapsing into the PC camp, and what's left is "cities gonna city", a little like Austin relative to the rest of Texas...

[adma]

The ONDP numbers in Don Valley West were artificially high last time after it was clear Kathleen would be stepping down and admitted defeat before the election, many thought she might even resign the seat after the election.  The NDP is usually below 10% in this riding which helps OLP.

On the other hand in 2018 the NDP just ran a "paper candidate" in DVW and spent no money and put no resources in. This time the NDP is running Irwin Elman the former Ontario Child Advocate and they seem to be prioritizing the riding. Interesting that both the PCs and NDP are running and star candidates while the Liberals a running a complete nobody in that seat.

Actually, Amara Possian did run a reasonably "visible" campaign within a no-hope riding in '18.  However, in the federal Orange Crush in '11, their candidate genuinely was paper/invisible and a talking point for the fact...

[adma]

The NDP targetted Eglinton Lawrence in 2015, how did that work out?

You know at the start of the campaign in 2015 polling had the NDP in the high 20s in Eglinton-Lawrence...then when the Trudeau Liberal tide rose it collapsed the NDP vote to 7% on election day.

Don Valley West has VASTLY better demographics for the NDP than does Eglinton-Lawrence. If Steven del Duca finds a way to duplicate what Trudeau did federally in 2015 and the Ontario NDP vote collapses to less than 20% (both very unlikely IMHO), the Liberals will win the Ontario Liberals win DVW easily and the NDP will be lucky to get over 10%. If on the other hand the NDP stays in second place and the Liberals only get a bit of a dead cat bounce compared to 2018 - the NDP vote in DVW will likely be respectable, though likely not enough to win....In an NDP surge context almost every Liberal vote could go NDP - but it would take a "wave election" to win DVW

I wouldn't say "vastly"; in fact, I'd call it a bit of a draw.  However, DVW *does* have a super-node of NDPish demographics: Thorncliffe--but that isn't enough to elect a social democratic party riding-wide; in UK terms, it's more like a token council-housing vote-sink Labour ward within an otherwise solidly Tory/Lib Dem council.

Eg-Law has no such super-node; or, the more proletarian-ethnoburban NDP-compatible places are generically W of the Allen Rd S of Lawrence and W of Bathurst N of Lawrence (places which arch-Dipper Howard Moscoe long ruled on municipal council.)  And conversely, the *super-super* rich neighbourhoods which cover most of the N part of DVW (i.e. those where NDP typically polls 0-5% other than within a few isolated Carluke Cres-type apartment nodes, and which cancel out any NDP-demo ballast Thorncliffe might carry) are comparatively limited in Eg-Law, mainly in the Armour Heights far NE...

[adma]

I would say that demographically Don Valley East is much more fertile ground for the NDP than is Don Valley West

Absolutely there; and it *was* more authentically a 3-way, or at worst 2 1/2-way, race in '18 (and federally in '11).

[adma]

The polling looks pretty good for PC but what are the chances of OLP-NDP tactical voting denying PC a majority?

Not very likely. Tactical voting (or strategic voting, as Canadians call it) isn't as sophisticated on this side of the pond. Most strategic left-wing voters tend to just back whichever of the Liberals or the NDP seem more likely to win provincewide, with riding-specific dynamics not playing as big a role as in the UK.

Well, riding-specific dynamics *can* play a part, as the aforementioned discussion of seats like Don Valley West and Eglinton-Lawrence demonstrates.  However, much as in the UK, it'd only work in the event that the NDP gained the upper hand.

There's definitely a progressive dream scenario where the strategic vote goes NDP in NDP-favourable areas and Liberal in Liberal-favourable areas, reducing Ford to a minority and allowing a coalition to defeat him. In some parts of the province, it's pretty obvious who an anti-Tory voter should back, but there are also a lot of three-way races, and even Liberal-NDP races (and unlike in the UK where Tories in Lib-Lab constituencies might back the Libs, Canadian Tories don't necessarily prefer the Libs over NDP). This complicates strategic voting a lot.

The other thing is, while many NDP/Liberal voters don't see much difference between the parties and are often willing to switch over (the "promiscuous progressive" phenomenon), the party establishment and machinery hate each other. This election is likely to be particularly vicious, because the NDP is terrified of falling back into third place and the Libs are terrified of staying in third place. Neither party has any incentive to encourage strategic voting or "give up" ridings where they could at least finish second, because this election has the potential of determining which of the anti-Tory parties emerges as the more dominant one in Ontario.

And in that crossfire, a critical point is all too often forgotten--the matter of subtracting *Conservative* votes, as opposed to the votes of one another.  Thus all that bickering while the ruling party chortles.  (Indeed, going back to '99, there were cases when second-term Harris Tory incumbents probably had their shares *elevated* thanks to voters rolling their eyes at the strategic-opposition crossfire--sort of like, "you're both goofs, we're sticking with the devil we know".)

[adma]

Well, riding-specific dynamics *can* play a part, as the aforementioned discussion of seats like Don Valley West and Eglinton-Lawrence demonstrates.  However, much as in the UK, it'd only work in the event that the NDP gained the upper hand.

For sure. Eglinton--Lawrence would be the perfect example of a riding where a strategic anti-Tory voter should back the Grits. The opposite would be the case somewhere like Essex or Oshawa where the NDP is naturally stronger than the Liberals - and for some really riding-specific cases, Waterloo and Niagara Falls, where the popularity of NDP incumbents Catherine Fife and Wayne Gates is a bigger factor than demographic predictors.

Then we also get weird ones like all the Brampton ridings, which are "naturally" Liberal, but the NDP made significant gains in 2018 (really, going back to Jagmeet Singh's provincial win in 2011), yet the Ford brand has a lot of resonance. Or perhaps somewhere like Ottawa West--Nepean, where all three parties could make a case for being the favourites to win - although given Ford's particular unpopularity in Ottawa and the general anti-Tory shift of the city in recent years, it may not be so. In ridings like those, strategic voting is really tricky and with strong PC numbers it could easily backfire for a large number of strategic left-wing voters.

But as I suggested: in the event that the NDP gained the upper hand--which'd mean, '18 foretelling a more UK-style dynamic.  Wherein a whole lot of those former "natural" Lib strongholds a la Brampton/Mississauga and most of the 416 would become "Labour", leaving the DVW's and E-L's in the Lib-Dem-esque Liberal camp.  But that's a hypothetical, rather than something realistic, unless Ontario's morphing into the next Manitoba or something...

Otherwise, once the *Libs* have the upper hand, *everything* is potentially in the Liberal pot thanks to the Libs' advantageous monkey-in-the-middle positioning (thus their federal sweeps under Jean Chretien).

[adma]

A more encouraging poll for the Liberals (36-32-23):

https://abacusdata.ca/ontario-election-2022-release/

If those numbers are accurate, then they'd likely mean a Liberal minority propped up by the NDP, but I'll honestly buy an OLP victory when I see it because when the campaign officially kicks off & the rhetoric heats up, you can bet that Ford & the PCs will tell people everyday that "while they may not like him, they should dislike Del Duca even more for reminding Ontarians everytime they pay their hydro bill of what he & Kathleen Wynne did to them the last time that the OLP was in power," & that "even if you dislike Ford, you just can't justify voting for the disaster that'd be a Kathleen Wynne protégé."

Though from what I've seen, the OLP's done extremely well in campaign recruitment--better than you'd expect from a party that lost OPS last time.  Like they *really* want to present '18 as a one-time nightmare--with comeback shades of Justin in '15, or for that matter Mike Harris in '95.  And Ontarians do have more of a comfort zone with the NDP as "third party"--23% being more a reversion to "upper mean" than, well, a Wynne '18-style catastrophe on *their* part...

[adma]

3. 23% for the NDP...oh boy.

Overall, good poll for the Liberals, mixed bag for Tories, awful for the NDP.

It's only "awful" if everything's about being the party of government; and we *all* know the ONDP faces a lot of deeply-entrenched-and-in-spite-of-themselves obstacles to that end, even if they go into this election as OO.  However, in terms of glass-half-full, at least Horwath's holding her 2014 base (so far, at least)--and that's still better than anything from 1990 up to that time.  And in the "managing expectations" sense, it's probably even what they were bracing for in '18 had Wynne not imploded.

When their polling numbers drop into teens, Mulcair-style (or for that matter, Wynne-style or Iggy-style), *then* we can speak in terms of "awful".  Right now, there's still the impression of a cushion, rather than a free fall--these are numbers the party has seen several times btw/the writ periods, they're not uniquely lower.  It's only a couple of points below the previous poll; they're treading water, they're not collapsing, they are, as I said, reverting to a mean, and at this point still an "upper mean".

*However*, I *can* see a different kind of danger if the NDP leakage continues--that is, the joint hollowing out of *both* "urban Andrea" a la 2018 *and* "big-tent-populist Andrea" a la 2014...

[adma]

ONDP at 23% isn't great, but also not so bad for them, it's probably the same number of seats as the OLP would get at 28-29%. The thing is, the ONDP could be at 0% in places like the Don Valleys, Etobicoke Centre, all of York Region, and much of rural-central Ontario, etc, which makes that 23% more like 30%+ in the rest of the province. The Liberals/PCs don't really have that "advantage", even in the Downtown Toronto ridings the PCs pull in more in the 15-20% range rather than the 0-10% the ONDP gets in the regions I listed.

Well, technically, they'd only be zero if they didn't run a candidate at all--which'd only happen if they were depleted in the manner of the NB NDP or various Prairie Liberal parties.  The likelier possibility is that they'd be reduced to federal-style single-digit numbers or not much more than that in places like York Region and DVW/Eg-Law (by comparison, they were only below 15% once in '18, in Del Duca's Vaughan-Woodbridge).  And actually, in a lot of Conservative rural Ontario, they do respectably--mid-teens as a norm rather than single digits.

Their 23% in '14 was good for 17 seats.  They have a lot more incumbent advantages now which'll be good for a boost at the bottom (and indeed, when it comes to polling, who knows how many "Ruth-Ellen Brosseau" cases you'll have when prompting party preference and prompting candidate preference elicits different results).  However, I can see a number of their surprise 2nds reverting to a 3rd place norm, and indeed the NDP might wind up conducting what's essentially a save-the-furniture type of campaign, even if it's geared t/w *all* the furniture rather than just a fragment of the same.  So there's an excellent chance that they'd still wind up salvaging 25 seats; it's just that none of them would be gains.  But 25 seats isn't 7 seats a la the Libs in '18.

[adma]

The cartoonish platform for the dissident New Blue party.

https://www.newblueontario.com/new-blue-print

I've seen people overemote over "totalitarian lockdowns" as some kind of make-or-break mass voter obsession point; but acting as if *critical race theory* were an issue in Ontario is *really* out in lulu land.  (Though maybe it's the modern version of Cold War Ontario kids growing up knowing more about George Washington and 1776 than about Sir John A. and 1867, thanks to the influence of cross-border media and entertainment.)

[adma]

The cartoonish platform for the dissident New Blue party.

https://www.newblueontario.com/new-blue-print

I've seen people overemote over "totalitarian lockdowns" as some kind of make-or-break mass voter obsession point; but acting as if *critical race theory* were an issue in Ontario is *really* out in lulu land.  (Though maybe it's the modern version of Cold War Ontario kids growing up knowing more about George Washington and 1776 than about Sir John A. and 1867, thanks to the influence of cross-border media and entertainment.)

Have you been paying attention to the past 4 years? How is CRT an American only issue?

I think the answer to that may be if you reflect upon the marginality of your stated R-ON allegiance.  

In fact, more so than the Derek Sloan/Rick Nicholls Ontario Party (which at least piggybacks more coherently upon a Bernierite solidity of purpose), New Blue indeed comes across as nothing more than an inane "GOP cosplay" entity (and given the nature of right-wing discourse in the States these days, even the inanity might be part of the cosplay).  Otherwise CRT, "Don't Say Gay", etc only has resonance among those who were surprised that Faith Goldy didn't do a whole lot better in her race for Toronto mayor in '18...


[ETA:  though the sex ed curriculum *did* likely play a factor in defeating Kathleen Wynne in '18, in part by throwing focus upon her own sexuality]

[adma]

The cartoonish platform for the dissident New Blue party.

https://www.newblueontario.com/new-blue-print

I've seen people overemote over "totalitarian lockdowns" as some kind of make-or-break mass voter obsession point; but acting as if *critical race theory* were an issue in Ontario is *really* out in lulu land.  (Though maybe it's the modern version of Cold War Ontario kids growing up knowing more about George Washington and 1776 than about Sir John A. and 1867, thanks to the influence of cross-border media and entertainment.)

Have you been paying attention to the past 4 years? How is CRT an American only issue?

Because it is? I've only ever heard it come up from people on the far right, i.e. people who pay 100% attention to US politics instead of their own.

Similar material is being pushed in Ontario schools as well. Do you want me to provide specific examples from the curriculum?

I would have more respect for people if they acknowledged it was happening but tried to defend it than trying to deny it is occurring at all.

When I talk about it not being an issue, I'm not saying that whatever one might label as "CRT" isn't happening.  What I'm saying is that Ontarians by and large aren't wound up over it being a big looming negative, except for the kinds of fringe yahoos who attend Charles McVety events.

Besides, this is Canada and Ontario, and one might say that TRC is our CRT--that is, if there *might* be a US-style "CRT backlash" impulse, it'd be over the perceived overwrought impulse to rename everything named "Dundas" or "Ryerson" or to "cancel" Sir John A. Macdonald...

[adma]

26% of Ontarians expect the Grits to win, while only 12% expect the same of the NDP. Should this kind of gap remain, it's good news for the Liberals, bad news for the Tories, and horrible news for the NDP - as we talked about recently in this thread, strategic voters in Ontario tend to rally behind whichever centre-left party they think more likely to win, and that's probably why the Grits are 9 points ahead of the NDP.

During the last election campaign I was talking to an online acquaintance who works as a lecturer at Ryerson U. She told me that even though she was unhappy with the Wynne government's privatization policies, she was still going to vote Liberal because the OLP was the only viable non-PC option. If she could think that in 2018, imagine how many people will think that in 2022. For all the talk that you hear about "tactical voting", in practice a large section of the electorate just interprets that as "voting Liberal".

Even with the Liberal Party almost absent from the legislature, when asked to contemplate an alternate government Ontarians opposed to the current government think of the OLP led by some guy they've never heard of rather than the NDP of Andrea Horwath, someone they presumably have known for years. There are a variety of reasons for that, but one that can be fixed is the leader. It's inarguable that Ontario voters don't view Horwath as a credible choice to be Premier.

Over the course of recent Canadian history, when a party has formed government after several decades out of power it has usually been with a new face. There's no real indication that the ONDP under Horwath can go any further than it's gone. If the goal of the NDP is forming government rather than self-actualization, then they need to seriously think about what they can do to get themselves there. These numbers indicate clearly that the present approach isn't working.

A lot of this is long-term.  And one might say that going into 1990, Ontario voters didn't view Bob Rae as a credible choice to be Premier, largely because of his party.  They saw him as a credible voice and leader at Queen's Park--but, *Premier*?  Come now.  For *that*, he should have done what he ultimately *did* do; join the Liberals instead.  An NDP government in Ontario?!?  Hahahaha.  It was either the commanding hand of David Peterson...or folksy Mike Harris haplessly assigned to prop up the hollow husk of the once-regnant PCs at a time when his party's label was mud thanks to the federal Mulroney Tories.  Which meant...in 1990, Peterson, and no other.  Right?  Like Bourassa ought to have been in '76.

And the way the Rae government actually *performed* in office vindicated that "come now" skepticism; and that endures in the glass ceiling Horwath's confronting.  Which is why Ontarians are still hardwired into red vs blue when it comes to the "Premier question".  However, because it's a parliamentary democracy, to view the election in such front-loaded "Premier-centric" terms is simplistic to the extreme, as if any system which offers anything but a de facto strict binary choice a la Dem vs GOP or Aussie-style Labor vs Liberal-National is hopelessly confounding.  Which is why a historically "3rd party" such as the NDP can win even as it loses (and which is why I emphasized pre-1990 Rae as a "credible voice and leader at Queen's Park" in separate terms from Premiership).

[adma]

Yes, I'm well aware (as, presumably, is everyone else in this thread) that the memory of the early '90s NDP government has caused problems for the NDP since. I'm interested in ways that the NDP can overcome those problems. As you allude to, Bob Rae was still relatively new in 1990, having been NDP leader for eight years. Andrea Horwath has been leader for half a decade longer than that and there's no indication that she successfully has made or will make Ontarians rethink the way they see her. The results of the last election put the NDP in a straightforwardly favorable position, but they don't have a leader who can take advantage of that. The NDP can't go back and change the '90s, but it can change its leader.

I wasn't alluding to Bob Rae "still being relatively new in 1990".  In fact, going into that election, he was viewing it as a third-time-around last kick at the can...and then, surprise!

As I indicated, voters did, in fact, see him as having a certain seasoned party-leader gravitas--which actually inadvertently *helped* him in 1990.  It's his party that was the problem--the NDP in Ontario always having that third-party socialist-hordes not-to-be-trusted-in-power stigma.  (And federally, too; when it looked like Ed Broadbent was poised for power going into the 1988 elections, third-party advertisers came out with warnings of an NDP government being "very very scary".)

Ontarians gave the NDP a chance in '90--and the NDP proceeded to apparently vindicate those not-to-be-trusted-in-power misgivings.  And the ghost of that lingers.

As I'm sure you know (as does everyone here), in the Westminster system the parliamentary minority is effectively powerless. The choice is far more binary than in other systems: either a party wins and has power or it loses and does not. This is why I added the clause about my analysis hinging on an assumption that the NDP's goal is forming government rather than self-actualization. Somehow this seems to be the end result of every discussion of the NDP on this forum. If the NDP by and large is able to conceive of politics and elections as a never-ending string of moral victories, it's no wonder Ontario voters don't perceive the NDP as a plausible future government.

And big effing deal.  The way I see it, electoral and parliamentary democracy is too dynamic a thing to boil down to zero-sum "plausible future government" at every freaking level.  It'll come when it comes--if it comes--and even in the event that the NDP *doesn't* form government, it can be positioned to inform policy (like w/the present Justin/Jagmeet deal federally).  And that even goes for the PCs and Liberals (and Mike Schreiner for the Greens) when *they're* out of power.  Indeed, in some ways, *all* these electoral forces are *most* insufferable when they overplay the "plausible future government" angle.

Same reason why the first round of any given French election is almost invariably more psephologically exciting than the second-round runoff.

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And of course, it took 4 elections for Jack Layton's "Orange Crush" breakthrough, even if it wasn't precisely a *win*.

Plus there's a bit of an "NDP tradition" of "loser" candidates plugging and plugging in there until they finally make it--Mel Swart being the most fabled case, but you can also point to various recent candidates a la Chris Charlton, Irene Mathyssen, etc.

One thing about Horwath: she shares a certain "shame about the party" thing with Bob Rae.  In Rae's case, his virtue was stateliness; in Horwath's case, her virtue is folksiness (that is, she's got more of a touchy-feely "Rob Ford" quality than even Doug Ford does).  But when the party in power doesn't give you official opposition oxygen, when major/corporate media treats your party as a non sequitur because their "left" comfort zone lies with Liberal red, and when the general populace is less "engaged" to provincial parliamentary politics than it might have been 30-40-50 years ago when traditional news media ruled, it's *really* hard to assert one's presence.  So NDP marginalization comes with the package, and it's something that no leadership change can address.  All it can do is try its best to be the proverbial "plausible future government", or if not that, a plausible future *influence* on government, through its being a valid representative of certain interests.

Otherwise, boiling it down to the "future government" is reductio ad absurdum--it's like suggesting that just because the Libs or NDP aren't going to win in rural Alberta, they shouldn't even *run* in rural Alberta, sort of like how certain vote-sink US Congressional seats become acclamations or only have token Libertarians and the like running.  That is...*dumb*.  It's like reducing motor travel to a map-free matter of programmed GPS destinations with complete uninspired incuriosity to what might be on the way...

[adma]

People can debate the pros and cons of Andrea Horwath but the fact that she has lost three elections (though gaining ground each time) is neither here nor there. Gary Doer lost three elections as NDP leader in Manitoba and was dismissed as a loser who was past his prime, then he won a majority in 1995 on his fourth attempt and went on to win three more elections after that!

Similarly Darrell Dexter lost three times as NDP leader in Nova Scotia and then won a majority in his fourth attempt. 

Dexter became Premier in his third election as leader (official opposition in 2003 and 2006, government in 2009) and at the time of victory he had been NDP leader for eight years, which is significantly less than the timeframe we're talking about. Doer is a reasonable comparison, although his case is obviously rare and in any case I doubt that the Manitoba NDP was in third place in the polls in the year of his fourth election.

In any case, I am not an expert. I do not live in Ontario so I am not exposed to Ontario media and I have no particular inside knowledge. I was merely offering a suggestion for the NDP's poor performance in recent polls. Even if it had made sense, it would obviously be too late to change leaders now, but I would be genuinely interested in hearing an affirmative case for Horwath from the perspective of someone who thinks that the NDP should be trying to win the election. What about Horwath makes her the one to lead the NDP back into government?

I think if one focuses upon the "nice person" part of my "nice person, shame about the party" argument, you get a *bit* of an idea of why she could be such a person.  And as for the "poor performance": it's still not *irretrievably* poor, particularly if one thinks in terms of Jack Layton polling closer to the 10th percentile at this stage of the game in 2011.  And finally, even if she *does* fall short once again, if she does so while leaving the party in good enough shape to live another day (or as I suggested, a "25-seat scenario" as opposed to a Wynne-esque "7-seat scenario"), that's the foundation for somebody who potentially *can*--to "finish the deal", so to speak.  I mean, *already* she's left the party in better shape than it was in when she entered the leadership; so *that* counts for something.  (Plus, there's the ever-looming likelihood of a minority circumstance, where even if she *is* pushed back into 3rd, she'd still be well-positioned to affect government policy.)

Also, there's the technicalities which *could* play out within the writ period, and which indeed often have the NDP outperforming between-election polling at the ballot box (think of Layton, or even Jagmeet Singh in '19): the NDP having a much larger caucus in place to build upon than the Liberals do, the NDP having the Official Party Status infrastructure in place which the Liberals don't, and other imponderables such as campaign and debate performance, and the fact that regardless of their default poll standing, the Liberals don't exactly have a "personable" leader themselves.

And honestly--Horwath's "negatives" have been overstated again and again, a combination of traditional condescension t/w the proverbial can-never-win "socialist hordes" and garden-variety sexism (almost invariably by male commentators).  Even in '18, when she was already polling promisingly, I was reading sniffy eye-rolling "Andrea?  Come now" judgments re her prospects--and then when she *did* outperform as per that promising polling, the attitude was "yeah, but she still lost".  Any opportunity to accentuate the negative will do; and it's that "yeah, but she still lost" attitude that she's been confronting ever since.

So yes--the path ahead of her is poisoned.  Not to the point of being untraversable; however, the nature of electoral politics is *way* too dynamic and multidimensional to be boiled down to nothing more than setting a GPS coordinate of "government" and following a prescribed path to the letter, over and over again, as if the electoral backroads and blue highways and business loops never existed...

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I can recall the comments at this place back in 2018 before campaign started. Lots of stories about people dismissing the NDP as a joke, despite the fact the Liberals were deeply unpopular at the time. I had a gut feeling the NDP would do well in that election based on the circumstances. I don't share that feeling now, however. I honestly don't know what will happen, really.

Well, I think the Libs have played things well, under the circumstances--candidate selection and all.  Even if their leader looks like that guy in the old Six Flags commercials.

Remember:  the NDP's eternal enemy, in Ontario especially, is Liberal concern trolling.  Whether it be along the lines of "wasted vote", or "a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Conservatives (y'know, the federal 2011 and provincial 2018 majorities, or maybe Mike Harris in 1995 as a consequence of Bob Rae in 1990).  And where any evidence of "underperformance" (which might basically just amount to "not winning", even as in 2018) is pounced upon as a fatal weakness and a catastrophe.

Which is, in the end, as silly as calling Jimi Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower" a flop and a disaster, because it only reached #20 on Billboard rather than spending 9 weeks at #1 like the Beatles' "Hey Jude".