Ontario ONDP Leadership (March 2023)

[Хahar 🤔]

It should (but clearly doesn't) go without saying that it's stupid to talk about "trends". This is Canada, the country with the most volatile politics in the anglophone world. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians will change their votes at the slightest provocation, or at no provocation at all. Imagine if when looking for a leader to replace Bob Rae the LPC decided to focus on "trends" instead of picking a leader who would be popular enough to win a lot of votes.

Last I checked, the places that voted for NDP candidates in 2022 were overwhelmingly poorer areas, which is inconvenient to people who want to talk about the unstoppable force of trends. Witness the way that people want so badly for Charlie Angus to have already lost that they ignore that he won his seat by eight points in 2021. They're so anxious to complain about how the NDP can't win because low-income voters don't vote NDP anymore that they're willing to do that regardless of the actual facts.

DL is correct in his assessment here. It's once again inconvenient to doomers that the OLP didn't immediately take its natural place as the party of government or whatever, but forming the official opposition in two consecutive parliaments means that the NDP needs to be taken seriously and needs to take itself seriously. They can't just give up and say that there's no point because the Liberals will surely take all their voters; that hasn't happened. It's important here to not fall into stupid traps like picking a token ethnic leader. (We hear all the time about the special tie that the Ford family has with immigrants, and as far as I know none of the Fords are visible minorities.)

The important thing now is to choose a leader who is credible enough to be taken seriously as a potential premier and who has the media abilities to be portrayed as the alternative to Doug Ford. Horwath was not bad in the sense of being serious, but after well over a decade it was clearly time for a change. Finding a leader with the right personal qualities is far more important than microtargeting individual demographics with the thought of either stopping trends or embracing them. The right leader will appeal to everyone and the right leader can be from anywhere. I don't know enough about Ontario to say who that might be, but it won't have much of anything to do with the riding they represent.