Ontario Election 2022

[brucejoel99]

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."

[brucejoel99]

Mike Gravelle the longtime Liberal MPP for Thunder Bay-Superior North is stepping down for health reasons. That seat will be wide open with him out of the picture. It was never a Liberal seat. It was a Gravelle seat.

Does a Gravelle endorsement/campaigning factor at all?

[brucejoel99]

The Mainstreet daily tracking has the NDP pulling ahead of the OLP for the first time on popular vote and up 33-13 in seats!

This may be something of an OO watershed moment. Tactical voting means that the second the OLP starts to lose steam as the obvious ABC vote, a ton of their fence-support could instantly start to vanish. It really might've been all that they had.

[brucejoel99]

Ford must be laughing his ass off right now, literally walking into another massive majority just for showing up. The NDP & OLP are so easily re-electing him that not only should this election have been called before the writ even dropped, but they should be embarrassed for running worse campaigns than would've been run by somebody trying to do this terribly. He could've been stopped from dismantling provincial healthcare & education services to spend billions on a highway that'll do nothing to relieve gridlock, but noooo, the OLP just has to offer every Ontarian such currently popular policies as a ban on handguns, mask-mandate reinstatements, & a legit $1 transit plan that nobody's even heard about because they're not told about it enough to matter anyway. The NDP's no better, in light of how Horwath just couldn't step aside 2 years ago when the writing was on the wall because she's too proud to recognize that she'll never win enough of the province over.

[brucejoel99]

The NDP's no better, in light of how Horwath just couldn't step aside 2 years ago when the writing was on the wall because she's too proud to recognize that she'll never win enough of the province over.

But again, was the writing ever that clearly on the wall for *her*?  A lot of the problem might be more with how it's been decreed that the ONDP *at large* is too proud to recognize that they'll never win enough of the province over--*whatever* the leadership.

And the laughing-his-way-to-a-majority circumstance on Doug's part is at least in part through MSM decreeing that a dud like Del Duca is the "real" opposition, whatever the '18 seat totals.

I think the writing was on the wall when, in Dec. 2019, polling had the post-budget cut, pre-pandemic Ford government as unpopular as the Wynne government... & it was the then-leaderless OLP with their official party status-less 7 MPPs - one of whom was Wynne, because, again, this was still just 18 months after they were evicted from their unpopular 15 years of power - leading polls instead of the OO! Now, they may fall from OO to 3rd, in their 4th election with Horwath as leader, against Doug the Thug & Steven "Who?" Del Duca, except he's not a nobody because he's just as good a target as Ford, given his baggage from the Wynne years, but sigh. If I were an ONDP member in 2022, I'd be embarrassed beyond belief, not least because it's still a party that literally did prove capable of winning enough of the province over once upon a time.

[brucejoel99]

 And also, when you're referring to Dec 2019, that was shortly after the federal election; and for a lot of Ontarians, the federal scene is a reminder of that Lib-default "anti-Conservative" comfort zone, so support for Justin winds up bleeding provincially.  So that it didn't matter whether the actual OLP was a leaderless lame duck; it was still the "Justin party" in many people's minds, whereas as goes the federal NDP, despite his provincial past, Jagmeet was more of an awkward third leg.

Upon reflection, maybe when it comes to the "ONDP didn't take proper advantage of being in Official Opposition" narrative, the fact that there was virtually no carryover of that dynamic to the federal sphere is an element I've seen few naysayers dwell upon--and remember, Jagmeet was part of the provincial caucus prior to becoming federal leader.  (*Maybe* it would have been different, in a Alexa '97 way, had he run in his Bramptonian home turf rather than in Burnaby.)

The difference: Singh was the NDP leader for 1 election in Dec. 2019, & Horwath had already been the ONDP leader for 3. And, ofc, the same pissed-off dynamic def existed after Mulcair managed to blow it so badly while already the federal O.O.

[brucejoel99]

Yes but keep in mind that it was Layton who led the NDP to OO status and the Mulcair who blew it. In contrast it was Horwath who let the NDP to a great result in 2018

Oh, of course, but the point is that the principle is the same: Mulcair, as the leader of the Official Opposition, delivered polling performances as late as the campaign period itself that saw the NDP capable of securing a majority government, & then he blew it; Horwath, in her 3rd go, finally secured the O.O. status, only to see the official party status-deprived OLP rise up back from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes & poll at majority government-levels within 18 months' time because she - for whatever reason(s) - couldn't capitalize on the government's failings. At that point, her blowing it & surviving becomes so baffling as to seem like she has kompromat on literally each & every single member of the ONDP.

(Not to mention, while the 2018 result was obviously great, it was in spite of Horwath, not because of her: they ran their generic progressive platform against a very-unpopular Wynne/the 15-year-old OLP government & the then-widely despised & mistrusted Ford-led PCs. Frankly, had she resigned after 2014 saw the ONDP run on a platform arguably to the right of the OLP, they literally could've been the incumbent government seeking re-election right now, but that's another matter.)

[brucejoel99]

adma, I'm done with being dragged around in circles on this topic after this post, & no offense, but most of what you have to say seems meaningless. The point of all of this is that Horwath & her ONDP, after nearly a decade with her at their helm & regardless of external factors, have proven incapable of presenting themselves as the obvious government of Ontario-in-waiting. When the federal NDP "blew it," failing to seal Layton's deal under Mulcair & finally win government, it wasn't through lack of effort: he'd slowly, but surely tanked a lot of goodwill by trying to appeal to the center, & so got outflanked by Justin. He was handed a single golden opportunity, squandered it, & got kicked to the curb. (That Singh thereafter brought the party back to a place of consistently polling well above the pre-Layton NDP is irrelevant, regardless of the fact that doing so actually earned him enough goodwill & trust in the party to justify his continued leadership thereof.) For better or for worse, by 10/19/2015, most likely Canadian voters knew enough about who Mulcair was & could imagine what his prime-ministership would be like, hence the verdict of the party membership at his leadership review 6 months later. Most Ontarians might not care all that much about provincial politics, but for one reason or another, Ford has been a non-stop topic of conversation in the province for nearly 4 years now, & Horwath has failed time & again to establish herself as the other half of a binary, OLP-less choice, perhaps through no fault of her own, but even after 3 tries, that ought to be irrelevant. Hell, even after 2, when anybody with a brain could've told Kinnock the day after the '92 British election that he'd be PM in '97 if he stayed on since Tory rule would inevitably crash after nearly 20 years, he still knew to step down.

[brucejoel99]

For having worked on that campaign, it's not Mulcair who blew it, but the paid campaign strategists and party employees.

The buck stops at the top.

Which is nonsense, as he is not the one who hired them and he couldn't fire them even if he wanted too, because labour law.

Surely he could legally overrule any stupidity on their part, though, as the head of the entity that they were employees of?

[brucejoel99]

For brucejoel, the leader of the party isn't the head of the entity, that would be whomever manages the party day to day (and unions, who would defend any incompetent employee, because it's their ''job'').

Fair, but was Mulcair, as leader of the NDP, really so powerless in his position as to be unable to prevent the party from abiding by the tactics of stupid-but-unfireable strategists & staffers? If so, then I don't see how the buck still doesn't stop with him, just due to his political weakness instead of poor strategizing. If not, then he actively enabled, if not partook in that stupidity, & so the buck definitely still stops with him.

[brucejoel99]

adma, I'm done with being dragged around in circles on this topic after this post, & no offense, but most of what you have to say seems meaningless. The point of all of this is that Horwath & her ONDP, after nearly a decade with her at their helm & regardless of external factors, have proven incapable of presenting themselves as the obvious government of Ontario-in-waiting.

Then under the circumstance, name who else could have done what Andrea couldn't.  You present it as if somebody else could have; I'm answering in terms of "it's complicated" due to political cultures both internal and external--in a way, the whole *nature* of the NDP, with rare exceptions (mostly in the Western provinces), is of a sort that's forever in a state of existential dilemma, to the point where once it tastes power real or imminent, the internal psychodrama kicks in.  And I'd suggest that's a *bit* the case w/the ONDP post-2018; which is why they couldn't consolidate on their OO status the way they could have.

There's an alternate universe out there where she resigned in 2014 after Wynne won a majority (lol), Singh is acclaimed leader of the ONDP, he wins in 2018, & Premier Singh presides over provincial affairs for the duration of the pandemic, but no, she ran a centrist campaign that managed to win only 5 seats, failing to gain any ground in an election which they triggered, & then got 77% in her leadership review, which is honestly insane when Singh was right there. Instead of being enticed to seek the federal leadership in 2017, the ONDP leadership frankly should've already been vacant by then; he was a well-performing MPP & the ONDP leadership wouldn't have been quite the leap that attempting to lead the federal NDP from outside of Parliament initially proved to be. And yeah, I do think that he would've stood a better chance of winning in 2018 compared to Horwath; that's speculation, & maybe it wouldn't have been a majority, but at least a Singh-led ONDP may have been able to overcome the plateau that the Horwath-led ONDP saw in the latter half of the 2018 election campaign: the ONDP surged in the polls, & then... plateaued, after which they didn't make it across the finish line, & I don't think anybody disputes that Singh could've picked up ridings that the ONDP wasn't previously competitive in. Ultimately, the ONDP chose to stick with Horwath at their helm not just in 2018, but for this year as well. Although I believe that I've already adequately expressed my disappointment in her inability to paint herself as the Ford government's legitimate opposition to date, I hope that she can somehow manage to pull it off nonetheless, but I sincerely doubt it.

And you know something?  "Obvious government in waiting" or no, that's what makes the NDP an eternally *interesting* presence in Ontario and Canadian politics, in a standing-on-the-verge-of-getting-it-on manner.  Win or lose, it's like their peculiar eternality lends and reinforces a certain subtle poetry to Canadian psephology--and if it's "meaningless" to you, then maybe you're just too limited and uninspired in your grasp of electoral politics to channel that poetry.

Who gives a sh*t about electoral poetry when healthcare, education, childcare, transport, & housing are all on the line!?

But that said, they seem to be in an inching-down-a-point-at-a-time phase according to Mainstreet, so maybe going below that 20% Frontier Of Doom come e-day isn't implausible for them...

The ONDP ending on sub-20 will be entirely dependent on how many ONDP->OLP strategic vote there are to be squeezed.

[brucejoel99]

The idea that Jagmeet Singh was destined to become premier had he stayed in Ontario politics doesn't stand up to a basic examination of his record in federal politics.

Well, it's good that nobody suggested ITT that Singh was destined to be Premier had he stayed in Ontario politics, then

FWIW Mainstreet today has a bit of a reversion to the mean with the NDP bouncing back from 20.8% yesterday to 23.4 today and that puts them more firmly in second place in seats. So when Marit Stiles gets acclaimed at the successor to Horwath sometime in the coming year she will be leader of the opposition and likely to be far more effective than Horwath was. The NDP should hope that Del Duca wins his seat that way the Liberals are stuck with him for another election!

Why the confidence that Marit Stiles will be the next leader? Davenport seems to me to be a seat full of exactly the sort of easily-led, sorry, promiscuous progressives who will flock to an OLP they've been told is the real opposition again.

The federal NDP came within 65 votes of winning Davenport when the federal Liberals took 37% across the province and the NDP took just 17%. I don’t think Stiles had much to worry about when the provincewide gap is 3 or 4 points and not 20! But that’s beside the point, the NDP will hopefully choose the most capable person as their next leader based on their skills as a communicator and as a leader I don’t see how the riding the next leader represents is of much relevance. Was the federal ndp wrong to have picked Jack Layton as leader Because his riding was Toronto Danforth?

Yeah, I was gonna say, federal & provincial settings obviously aren't exactly comparable, but when the riding was very close in the last federal election & only just barely managed to stay Liberal, it'd seem that Stiles's chances, as a high-profile MPP in her own right already, are in a good state of affairs, not least given the the sheer scale of her 2018 victory. I mean, Jerry Levitan can certainly expect to improve on the OLP's rock-bottom 2018 result, sure, but you'd expect it to have been treated as something of more of an actual high-profile race than it's been thus far if they thought that he was actually gonna be able to win. Hell, she's the Ford's government's critic on the issue that they've arguably f**ked up the most; if the OLP wants to prove that it's the real opposition, then it should show that an O.O. frontbencher like Stiles isn't.

[brucejoel99]

What's the bar for the OLP to not stick with Del Duca for the next election? Just losing his seat, or losing out on the O.O.? Because if he at least delivers a respectable-enough increase in vote share to return the caucus to official party status, then I could understand not turfing him even if he does lose his seat (ofc, he may very well just moot it anyway & resign to make way for somebody else in that event; &, obviously, if the OLP somehow won or at least take over as the O.O., then it'd be moot because he likely won his seat in the event that the OLP was strong enough to be doing either of those), but at the same time, if the OLP only makes marginal gains, then it has to ask itself why it's struggling, since it's quite telling that the people who swung to the PCs from the Wynne/Del Duca Liberals in 2018 are pretty exclusively staying with the PCs this time around, with OLP support gains emanating pretty exclusively from the 2018 OLP->ONDP vote. Maybe most importantly, the OLP will certainly have the 1.5-2 free years needed to both stage another leadership convention & install a new permanent leader with enough time for them to hopefully garner some good experience in time for the next election.

[brucejoel99]

My hot take: the New Blue + OP + other dissident right wing parties combined will have a better showing in Ontario than the PPC did. My reasoning? It's basically a foregone conclusion that Ford's got this in the bag, and not just among political junkies, everyone seems to say this. The motivation to stop the left (or in the federal election, to get Trudeau out of power) just isn't there to dissuade dissident right-wingers. Additionally, I'm guessing this will be a low-turnout election, but angry people vote.

Yeah, compared to New Blue's, the PPC's existence was pretty much completely unwarranted beyond soothing Bernier's ego because there was no need for an alternative conservative party when the mainstream conservative party wasn't even in power to begin with, whereas at least New Blue is protesting an incumbent conservative government, so New Blue has the benefits of timing, optics, & opportunity that the PPC didn't, such as they're "benefits," since they'll be electing 0 MPPs.

[brucejoel99]

The Final Legar is brutal, PC's at 40% with NDP, would be an absoulte wipeout if that actualy happend.

The final Leger has the PCs at 40%, OLP at 25% and NDP at 24%...if that actually happened the Liberals would be stuck in the low teens in seats and the NDP would definitely still be official opposition

https://leger360.com/voting-intentions/provincial-politics-in-ontario-june-1-2022/

And this is before the PCs even beat their polling & the NDP underperforms theirs, as is tradition.

[brucejoel99]

Prediction time, I guess:

A blowout win for Ford; the OLP gets official status but not OO, & Del Duca loses his riding & resigns as leader; Horwath resigns as leader; the night's only highlight is the underdog Green effort beating the PC machine in Parry Sound-Muskoka:

PCs - 88 MPPs (40.8%)
NDP - 20 MPPs (22%)
OLP - 14 MPPs (26.2%)
GPO - 2 MPPs (6%)

[brucejoel99]

So what, if anything, changed in the last few days that put the PCs back in such solid majority territory? Was it just a matter of the opposition vote not breaking one way or the other?

Like Hatman said, probably some herding going on at this point. But if the upswing in PC support is "real", it still makes sense. When there is an incumbent government that isn't terribly unpopular, undecided voters tend to break for them.

In all honesty, the RoI of the PC campaign is producing brilliant results precisely because they haven't really even had to campaign in the first place: a basic message of getting sh*t done & keeping their mouths shut about basically everything else is all that's been necessary for efficacy. The PCs are winning again because they simply abided by the Napoleonic tactic of never interrupting your enemies when they're making mistakes: namely, the OLP & ONDP cannibalizing each other.

Of course, what doesn't exactly serve to help &, indeed, rather hurts them is that they're both led by milquetoast political veterans who are incapable of running good, inspiring campaigns & who've long overstayed their welcomes in ON politics. Frankly, the OLP is a sad shell that doesn't even know who its voters are or have a feel for what actually matters. It still hasn't recovered from 2018 because it hasn't found its identity. Provincial voters have no reason to trust them again when they don't really stand for anything; see: most of their messaging in this election being - just as it was at the tail-end of 2018 - geared toward telling people 2 things: Ford sucks, but don't vote for the NDP. That reeks of desperation, just as it did at the tail-end of the last campaign. Their platform itself is actually interesting, but that doesn't matter much when seemingly all of their messaging is instead focused on just how much of a worse choice all of the others are. As for the ONDP, I've already expressed my issues about them. I'll just add that it's no wonder that the working-class is allying itself with the PCs over the party that was literally founded to stand up for the working-class when said party seemingly does nothing these days but pander to urban progressives. The ONDP putting a hard day's work into figuring out how to jive with the working-class again would go a long way toward potential successes in the future, but I digress about the present. And the Greens, despite having the best leader in the province by far & maybe even the best platform too, are sadly stuck at the bottom because people probably still see them as "radical." RIP. Still, fingers are crossed for Parry Sound-Muskoka.

This election could've been great. Now, it's just sad. ON doesn't deserve 4 more years of Ford's highways over climate action.

[brucejoel99]

PC landslide inbound:

https://twitter.com/cbcqueenspark/status/1532503797951614976