PM NEEDS A WYNNE WIN
For 46 years, Ontario’s leading party has been opposite of prime minister’s
From its opening days, the Ontario campaign has seen an unusual convergence of federal and provincial politics, with Ottawa Tories hammering Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne for her tax-and-spend ways, and Wynne enthusiastically bashing Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Saturday, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird campaigned for the Ontario Tories in Ottawa. It’s as though the federal and provincial wings of both the Conservative and Liberal parties have, for the time being, fused.
The irony is that, in both cases, melding is the last thing they
The pattern isn’t perfect: But it’s too consistent to be coincidental. It’s also logical.
need. Indeed, it would be better for the federal Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, if Wynne were to lose the June 12 election. The federal Conservatives, meantime, will be in a stronger position next year if she wins. The reasons have to do with Ontario’s peculiar political culture, which abjures extremes while, somewhat paradoxically, voting for them in cycles, and the province’s heavyweight status at the federal ballot box.
The essential frame in Ontario politics, dating back to the Bill Davis years, is cantilevered, or counterweighted. So, for most of the Pierre Trudeau era federally, from 1968 until 1984 (with a nine-month break in 1979 to make room for Joe Clark), Davis held sway at Queen’s Park. Davis became premier in 1971 and remained in power until 1985.
After a five-month interval for doomed Conservative successor Frank Miller, Liberal David Peterson then took over as a minority premier — coinciding more or less with the accession federally of Conservative Brian Mulroney, in 1984. While Mulroney midwifed Canada-U.S. free trade and his finance ministers began to talk about curbing federal spending, Peterson offered quintessential “Big-L” Liberal policy, including pay equity and pension reform. Initially, he was backed by the Bob Rae-led New Democrats. Peterson won a majority in 1987, taking 95 of 130 seats. A year later, Mulroney won his second majority.
And so it continued, the leftright see-saw, with Rae’s NDP roosting at Queen’s Park from 1990 to ‘95, racking up enormous deficits and putting the province’s economy on life support, while in Ottawa the Chretien Liberals inherited and pursued signature Mulroney fiscally conservative policies — North American Free Trade, the deficit-busting GST, and debt reduction — with greater vigour and success than the Conservatives had.
Briefly, a time of austerity in Ottawa coincided with a sharp right turn in Toronto, with the rise of Conservative Mike Harris in 1995. But it wasn’t long before the federal Liberals, having slain the federal deficit in 1998, began “reinvesting” in government. That created a classic Ontario federal Liberal-provincial Conservative bifurcation until 2003. That year, of course, marked the accession of Dalton McGuinty to the premiership. A year later, Harper began his inexorable rise in Ottawa, first holding Liberal Paul Martin to a minority, then defeating him in 2006.
The pattern isn’t perfect: But it’s too consistent to be coincidental. It’s also logical. Put simply, when the country veers right, middle-ofthe-road Ontarians tend to push Queen’s Park leftward, and vice versa. This may explain, at least in part, why the Ontario Liberals are still in office, after 11 years of scandal, piled upon boondoggles, piled upon broken promises.
The current set of leaders and circumstances add new twists to the old pattern. Ontario Tory leader Tim Hudak, though ideologically hand-in-glove with his federal counterparts, is brand-wise distinct from them, because of his relative youth — he’s 46 — and because he hasn’t yet held power, and so can campaign on “hope and change,” which Harper of course can’t. Hudak’s nearest federal counterpart in this respect is Justin Trudeau, who is 42. The Harper Conservatives’ doppelgänger? Of course it’s the Wynne Liberals. Though oil and water ideologically, the two parties are peas in a pod in terms of their life cycles.
In Trudeau’s case, there’s yet another element, which is his strategy to encompass the socially progressive left and fiscally conservative right in a straddle. For the strategy to succeed, the Liberals must be perceived as tightfisted, in the Paul Martin-John Manley tradition. That doesn’t square well with Wynne’s brand of Liberalism, which is somewhere left of where Bob Rae’s NDP stood in 1993-’94. Yet the two parties are organizationally joined at the hip; they share ground teams in most Ontario ridings.
It boils down to this: Should Hudak become premier June 12 and remain premier through 2015, momentum for change will get a boost; Ontarians will feel liberated, possibly, to consider options other than the Tories federally; and Ontario Liberal ground teams will turn all their energies to getting the federal Liberals elected. Should the profligate Wynne remain premier, by the same token, the Harper Conservatives will retain their best case for another term, which is that someone familiar with a balance sheet must remain in charge, somewhere, lest the country borrow and spend itself to rack and ruin.
It is a curious state of affairs, to say the least — made more so by the fact that none of the players can afford to admit a jot of it is true.