「地下鉄」/「Archlich」
I am the bone of my transit
Buses are my body and Subways are my blood
I have created over a thousand lines
Unknown to approval, Nor known to completion
Have withstood pain to create many plans
Yet, this city will never build anything
So as I pray, unlimited debate works.
All right, very quickly, a summary of Ontario’s 2011 general election campaign. Ontario is having a general election on October 6, 2011. This date is chosen by a dumb fixed-date election law. Yes, fixed-date election laws are dumb in a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. So what’s in store for each of the players?
The Green Party of Ontario is lead by Mike Schreiner. Unlike the Green Party of Canada, there is nowhere near as much cohesive support for the Greens. They also don’t seem to be doing the all-in strategy like the GPC did for Elizabeth May, so their chances of success are near zero. I don’t know much else about them except that they may or may not be quasi-lolbertarians.
The Ontario Liberal Party is lead by The Honourable Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario and MPP for Ottawa South. He will be having a difficult time holding on to power because of a combination of unpopular initiatives, perceived rising cost of living, and the natural tendency for unpopularity to grow the longer you’re in office. Like the other major parties, he has some populist crap thrown in there like the tuition reduction and new citizen tax credit, but he also seems to actually have a vision in green energy and the educated workforce, which is more than I can say for the others.
For most of the months leading up to the campaign period, it looked like he was screwed and we’d get a Tory majority. Luckily, once we entered the campaign period, he seems to have caught up and is in a position to at least attempt to form a government. Unlike the others, his strategy is less clear and will involve trying to mitigate his losses as best as he can and possibly causing the others to stumble.
The Ontario New Democrats are lead by Andrea Horwath, MPP for Hamilton East. She seems to be trying to have the same disposition as Jack Layton in connecting with working families and such. The ONDP seems to be taking a leaf out of the BCNDP handbook and going for a set of piecemeal populist proposals rather than any coherent social democratic vision and leaving urban issues and the environment out.
That probably has a lot to do with their strategy. Andrew Steele had written about Ontario electoral strategy, where you can split seats up into urban, suburban, and rural and go for two of the three. The ONDP, in choosing Horwath, was going with the classic NDP working class and northern rural ridings. This is pretty unfortunate, because with Jack Layton’s passing, there was an opportunity to grab some of those urban seats.
The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario is lead by Tim Hudak, MPP for Niagara South. This election should have been a cakewalk for Hudak. He was going to end up with a million seats and complete the conservative hat trick. Of course, John Tory was supposed to do that last time, and, well. Hudak’s strategy has largely been to remind everyone how bad McGuinty is, which is all well and fine, but he hasn’t really told us what he’s going to do other than TAXES BAD.
Like the ONDP, the PCPO largely set their strategy in choosing their leader. What they’re hoping to do is to repeat Mike Harris’ electoral success in going for rural and suburban seats after the failed experiment in trying to go for urban seats with under John Tory. In a way, this is also the Conservative Party of Canada strategy. The problem here is that I don’t think Hudak has done enough to cement his victory among suburban ridings. Certainly, his railing against foreign workers and foreign students isn’t going to help in that demographic.
The OLP and PCPO are neck-in-neck with no one in clear majority territory. The next parliament could very well be a hung parliament. Ontario’s history indicates that we could end up with a minority government or a coalition or some kind of deal. And polling seems to indicate that a ton of ridings will be flipping, so really, this is going to be pretty messy.
Last post about politics for a while, I swear.
So it appears we’ve replaced short-term instability and long-term predictability with short-term stability and long-term unpredictability. Everyone who won, won big. Everyone who lost, lost big.
A big problem I can identify is that people don’t care about what goes on in Parliament. For most people, politics begins when the writs are dropped and ends when a winner is declared. What goes on in between? No one knows, which is why things like confidence or contempt don’t matter. It doesn’t seem like it matters immediately, but it does set a dangerous precedent, especially in a system that largely relies on the players not being dicks to one another.
Which leads me to the constitutional issues which have been sidestepped as a result of the majority. I’ve already mentioned my displeasure with the way the prime minister of all people was trying to thwart the concept of responsible government for political expedience. We’ve been spared that negotiation phase which would’ve been even worse than whatever the UK went through in the days following the 2010 election because of the two years of misinformation the Conservative party has been broadcasting about forming governments. But now’s probably a good time to hammer some of that stuff out now that we know that it’s possible to reach those previously impossible scenarios.
The other interesting revelation that I’ve been thinking about is how Canadians think about politics. Anyone who pays any attention at all to politics can see that the Conservatives have largely lifted Republican political tactics. I know we love to believe that we’re sharper than Americans and that we’d never fall for the same tricks, but this election clearly proves that we’re just as dumb as we think they are, because Canadians lapped up those pre-writ ads about Ignatieff at face value. My guess is that we’ve just never had any party that was enough of a dick to smear a rival outside of a campaign all the time.
But the big news is how electoral politics in Canada has changed. Quebec remains diametrically opposed to whatever is going on in the rest of the country. The governing coalition is now made up of the West and Ontario. Social democracy has replaced neoliberalism as the dissenting voice against neoconservatism. Are we seeing polarization between the left and right or is the prospect of power drawing the Conservatives and NDP closer together?
One thing is certain and it’s that 2015 is going to be a very different campaign from 2006, 2008, and 2011. The immense number of flips that occurred this time means that the fight could be wide open in a lot of places around the country. Pretty much anywhere that isn’t Alberta and the West are going to see a lot of pandering to over the next few years.
You may recall that I had a bunch of ridings that I was interested in. When I was watching the results come in on election night, I think by the time a good number of Ontario results had gotten back, I pretty much tossed out my list and spent the rest of the night watching Southwestern Ontario and the GTA.
I was hoping for a Conservative minority with close to 100 NDP seats. I was definitely not expecting Toronto Liberals to get decimated. I think I knew the Liberals were done when my riding, Scarborough—Rouge River, where the previous Liberal MP won with something close to 60% of the vote, had the NDP candidate in first, well ahead of the Conservative. Definitely my surprise of the night.
The biggest disappointment of the night was Glen Pearson’s loss in London North Centre. I’d been reading his blog for a while now and from what I’ve read about him, he seemed like an amazing MP. Since I’ll be moving to London in September, this was a huge disappointment. The other big disappointment was Andrew Telegdi’s loss in Kitchener—Waterloo. Even with people being made aware of the vote split, the gap widened even more.
But I think with a lot of Toronto ridings in Scarborough and Etobicoke going blue, I pretty much gave up on the 905 ridings. That said, everything in the GTA was extremely close, with a good number of them being three way races. And while there were a bunch of good Liberal MPs that fell, there were also a bunch that I wasn’t too fond of. The one I was glad to see go was CRIA shill Dan McTeague in Pickering—Scarborough East.
And now, on to what the next four years holds for each party.
This is Harper’s dream come true, being able to simultaneously gain a majority and crush the Liberal Party of Canada. The question now is how he’ll govern. I have no doubt that he’ll avoid any major controversies. Those social conservatives expecting him to repeal same-sex marriage and abortion will be disappointed. Hardcore neoliberals will be disappointed that he won’t be ripping the Canada Health Act apart.
Harper isn’t dumb. He knows that his coalition of Western and Ontario voters is fragile and suddenly going hard right is going to unsettle those Ontario pickups. However, he has plenty of sneaky ways of destabilizing and slowly reforming things. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him continue governing as he did with a minority, appearing to be moderate, but slowly undermining various institutions (remember StatsCan?) in ways that are invisible to the average Canadian.
At the same time, he’ll have to somehow keep his base happy. If he continues to pander too hard to the GTA and Ontario, he could risk pissing off the West. The idea that the Conservatives could lose the West seems ridiculous, but that’s exactly what Mulroney ended up doing in the early 90s by pandering too hard to Quebec. The result? Gotta love that word REFOOOOOOOOOOORM.
The other question is whether he’ll be on better behaviour. Are we going to see complete message control and muzzling of his caucus and Cabinet? Are we going to continue to see watchdogs gutted and bureaucrats who disagree offed? Are we still going to see ads vilifying the Leader of the Opposition? Some people might claim that it was necessary to act like a dick in a minority government, but it clearly works, so I wonder if they’ll really be able to give that up.
And it’ll be interesting to see whether he’s willing to implement those things that he’s always wished he could but didn’t have a majority to do. The thing that comes to mind is Senate reform. In this category of stuff, he can’t really blame the opposition or the Senate now that he has a majority in both houses.
Finally, there is that ticking time bomb in Quebec. That the province of Quebec has, once again, largely rejected the Conservatives is fairly significant. While they’ve chosen a federalist party in the NDP, they’re almost certain to elect a sovereigntist government before 2015. That means it’ll be up to Harper, an anglo from the West and by far the most unpopular federalist leader in Quebec, to fight for federalism. It’ll be a huge challenge, not just for Conservatives, but for federalists as well.
It appears the brand that the Liberal party has cultivated over the last century has finally lost its power.
I alluded before to the fact that the Liberals had been largely reduced to the major urban centres and Atlantic Canada. It’s been argued by some that the Liberals have had this structural problem pretty much since 1993. The party has never won much outside of Vancouver in the West since Trudeau and they were still able to do decently in Quebec even with the Bloc, while riding the Reform/PC vote splitting in Ontario. Once the Bloc took Quebec and the splitting on the right was resolved, those structural problems became a lot more obvious.
The problem for the Liberals since 2006 has been not resolving this problem. Dion and Ignatieff largely stayed the course in terms of the voters they were trying to court. Dion tried to appeal to progressives with his ambitious environmental plan at the expense of Alberta. Unfortunately, Canadians didn’t care about the environment that much. Ignatieff tried a very safe, low-ball appeal to centrists. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for either right-leaning or left-leaning voters.
They’ve always assumed that they could just win by default if they reminded Canadians that the Liberals were Canada’s natural governing party. Obviously, people eventually stopped listening and since the Liberals have largely been stuck with the same electoral base they’ve had since 2006, they eventually got squeezed out. Both the Conservatives and NDP have been trying to grow their parties and the result is that all of the Liberal strongholds have been shattered. There’s nothing left. And in 2015, it’ll be even harder because that incumbency advantage will be gone.
Now, they have a ridiculous amount of work to do if they ever want to be in government again. What that would be, I have no idea. Presumably, some of it will have to do with presenting an authoritative voice in the various important issues that will be coming up, like health negotiations with the provinces or that Quebec sovereignty hullabaloo. And you know, actually say something meaningful about it, unlike Ignatieff’s surface level explorations of the subject on the campaign trail.
It turns out the ground game wasn’t that important in Quebec. Unfortunately, that means that it’s all the easier for the NDP to lose their flash of support in four years. The example that everyone brings up is Mario Dumont’s ADQ in 2007.
The challenge for the NDP now is to become seen as a viable alternative government in four years. There’s two sides to this. The biggest problem is the perception that the NDP are disastrous for the economy. Whether they are or aren’t doesn’t really matter if people just pass over them because that one time in the past their provincial cousins governed poorly. Obviously, they’ve overcome their other huge problem, which was the perception they couldn’t win.
A lot has been made of the relative inexperience of the new Quebec MPs, but I think that’s been overstated. Yeah, there are some McGill students and that one lady, but there were plenty of other excellent candidates too. I don’t think the NDP will have a hard time filling up committee and shadow cabinet posts.
The main issue with Quebec will be how they respond to the sovereignty movement and whether they’ll be able to represent Quebec to Quebec’s satisfaction. Remember that a lot of the NDP’s support is coming from people who were voting Bloc and likely have some degree of nationalist thought in them.
Outside of Quebec, they’ve made a few gains in Atlantic Canada (although not as much as polling would’ve indicated) and surprisingly in Toronto. In addition to legitimacy, the NDP will probably have to work a lot harder to keep their seats. History has shown that people are perilously unkind to the NDP when they screw up even once.
Of course, much of the NDP’s success is because of Jack Layton. But his health is not the greatest and it was expected that he might’ve stepped down after this election if it weren’t for, you know, doing really well. This could be a problem by the time 2015 rolls around. Of course, they do have Mulcair hanging around, so he should be able to handle Quebec. I guess this would go along with building the NDP brand.
It’s hard to say whether the collapse of the BQ was more or less surprising than that of the Liberals, but it is amazing that it only took a week or two for the BQ to just disintegrate. And it wasn’t just an unfortunate vote split like it was for the Liberals. Nope, Quebec was done with the Bloc this time around.
Is this the death of the sovereignty movement? Probably not. After all, the main vehicle for separatism has always been the Parti Québecois, not the Bloc. It was PQ premiers that held referenda and were the strongest voices for sovereignty. With another PQ government likely before 2015, it’ll be interesting to see whether Gilles Duceppe remains as popular a figure then, especially if Harper will be the one having to defend Canada.
Even though Quebec went with the NDP, it’s important to note that their choice is largely at odds with the rest of Canada, who generally went Conservative. It’s another fairly stark display of the contrast in values that Quebec has compared to the rest of Canada. And if you consider that gulf, it’s a possibility that Quebecers could decide that a Conservative Canada isn’t something that they really want to be a part of.
The question now is what the Bloc are going to do with their party. Just because they were wiped out this time doesn’t mean that sovereigntist sentiment has dissipated or that they’re never going to win again. If things go well for the Bloc and things go poorly for the NDP, we could just as easily see another dramatic swing back. Just ask Mario Dumont.
They gambled and they won. Elizabeth May gets to go on to be the first elected Green MP in Canada. I’m sure she’ll be a better MP than that Conservative cabinet minister they had. What this means for the future of the party, I’m not entirely sure. They can’t just replicate what they did for May, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the increased profile of their leader will be enough to tip the scales.
See you in 2015 (unless Harper breaks his own fixed-date election law again lolololol).
Canada’s having an election! How exciting! I was actually ready to write a post about this back when the government was defeated at the end of March, but decided I should probably study or something instead.
The last few years have taught me that I shouldn’t take for granted that people know how a Westminster Parliament works. That’s pretty unfortunate, because every thread of this election campaign that isn’t about the economy (more on that in a moment) revolves around Parliament and the exploitation of the fact that Canadians don’t know how it works. This has made it very difficult to understand why we’re having an election in the first place and it’ll likely be the case that the campaign doesn’t actually end after all the voting is done.
So why are we having another dumb election again just two and a half years after the last one? Because the government could not retain the confidence of the House of Commons. This was the result of the government being found in contempt of Parliament for refusing to disclose the cost of various programmes. It is not because the opposition didn’t support the budget (although that would likely have been the case were it not for the contempt charge).
The charge of contempt of Parliament is similar to that of contempt of court, in which you’re charged if you’re found to be obstructing Parliament from performing its duties. This is for Parliament to decide and is pretty serious business. In the case of a government, the most severe punishment the Commons has is to withdraw its confidence in it.
The Conservatives have been brushing aside the contempt charge as political shenanigans because Canadians don’t understand the implications. This is why it’s important to examine the leadup to the vote itself. Most notably, it required the Speaker to rule against the government for a breach of privilege before it was handed off to committee to produce a report. This is important, because this isn’t the first time that this government has been ruled against for withholding documents.
Recall the prorogation of Parliament at the beginning of 2010. The prime minister requested that Parliament be prorogued in part to dodge questions surrounding Afghan detainee transfers. After Parliament had resumed, the government refused to provide documents regarding the transfers citing cabinet confidentiality. The Speaker basically said that Parliamentary privilege superceded cabinet confidentiality and that if they didn’t work something out with the opposition, they would be ruled against. That time, the government obliged.
That covers contempt, but I want to talk about confidence, because this is the thing that most people misunderstand about Parliamentary democracy and nothing’s changed since December 2008, when Stephen Harper was on the verge of losing the confidence of the House of Commons, only to stave it off by proroguing Parliament.
This misunderstanding of confidence is rooted in the misunderstanding of just who it is Canadians vote for in elections. You are not voting for a prime minister. You are not voting for a party. You are not even voting for a government. You are voting for a Member of Parliament. This may seem like a silly distinction to make, but it matters when we talk about forming governments. Peter Russell always makes these sorts of things succinct and easy to understand: “We elect the Parliament and the Parliament decides who gets the right to govern.”
Confidence of the House of Commons is all that’s required to become a prime minister and form a government. It’s based on the principle of responsible government, that the government is accountable to Parliament. The party with the least seats could form the government if it had the confidence of the Commons. And it’s just as possible that we could end up electing 308 independents who’d then need to figure out how to form a government.
The interesting thing is that within this framework, there is a way to form a government without having to face another election. This is deliberately allowed so that a government that doesn’t have the confidence of the Commons doesn’t just give up and ask for another election. The assumption here is that, within a reasonable amount of time, Canadians chose that particular Parliament to work with and it’s the duty of Parliament to be able to form a government with the members that it has.
The problem is, of course, that the Conservatives have been telling Canadians that forming a government in that way is unconstitutional. Which is silly, because anyone can just go to Wikipedia and find an example or two. There are plenty of things the Conservatives can attack such an arrangement for, whether it’s warranted or not: relying on the Bloc, the NDP’s governing record, or instability. The one thing they can’t and shouldn’t be attacking is constitutionality, because in doing so, it attacks the basic principles of Parliamentary democracy.
And for me, that’s what this election’s mainly about. A lot of people might criticize Trudeau centralizing power in the PMO or Chrétien for strong-arming Parliament, but I can’t speak to that, because I wasn’t cognizant of how they ran their government at the time. But I do know that Harper runs his government too dictatorially for my tastes and that his party is too obstructionist when dealing with the opposition. It shows in his campaign and contrasting that with Ignatieff or Layton or even Duceppe, I don’t get the sense that any of them would clamp down on their government anywhere near as much as Harper did. An open, transparent, and credible government is far more important to me than our economic recovery.
That’s not to say that the economy isn’t important. It is, but if a Liberal or NDP government is all it takes to ruin the recovery, then the Conservatives have done an awful job. This is not to mention that the stimulus spending is a direct result of the opposition forcing the government to act in December 2008. Remember in the dying days of the 2008 campaign when Harper flatly denied that Canada would be affected by the economic crisis?
Anyway, what are the prospects for each of our fine participants?
The Conservatives ran their campaign with a very unambitious strategy: focus on a handful of swing seats and flail arms wildly about the dangers of a coalition to the rest of the country. And for much of the campaign, it looked like it was going to work. Most of the people they were targeting don’t care about Parliamentary shenanigans and are far more interested in how a Conservative government would benefit them.
The campaign hit a few snags. They were only minor snags from the campaign’s point of view, but it definitely intensified anti-Conservative sentiment, which made it all the more crucial that they pick up those few seats they were targeting. And Harper was able to fend off attacks from the opposition like some sort of giant immovable rock, not really hitting back, but repeating the same wearisome talking points again and again.
The thing that has put a Conservative majority in danger is, surprisingly, the NDP surge. Outside of Ontario, it puts several Conservative seats into play that were thought to be safe and within Ontario, it could affect just enough seats that the hope for a majority fades away. The huge tactical error that made this possible was the focus of attacks on Ignatieff alone.
Post-election prospects are fairly shaky. If the Conservatives lose enough seats, it could be enough for Harper to call it a day or be forced out. If they maintain or gain seats, but still have a minority, he could conceivably hold on, even if he does eventually lose power, since there could be a chance that any arrangement by the Liberals and NDP is as unstable as he says it is. Still, it’s a significant repudiation of the choice that Harper has presented to Canadians.
Michael Ignatieff’s career as a politician has been pretty unlucky. Remember that back in 2006, he was supposed to be the next Trudeau. He came back to lose the Liberal leadership race (which he probably should have, having spent so little time as an MP) and had to wait through two years of Dion capitulating to the Conservatives. When he finally became the leader, he continued a string of tactical errors and was subjected to good old Conservative character assassination for two years. He finally gets the chance to run a campaign and actually does it well, but ends up getting passed over for the NDP.
It sucks, because while he isn’t as progressive as Dion, he’s certainly a better leader. He’s a much more able speaker and campaigner. He had solid policy proposals and his war room was on the ball. Even if he didn’t win, he probably would have been able to continue and live to fight another election.
Except Quebec started to notice that the NDP existed. And then everyone else noticed that the NDP existed. Even Ontario, who hates the NDP is starting to notice. Even worse is that Jack Layton is a lot more likeable than Michael Ignatieff. Of course, much of that is perceived, since Layton hasn’t been the target of a two-year concerted character assassination effort.
At this point, things are not looking good for Ignatieff post-election. If he loses seats, that’s bad. If he loses Official Opposition status, that’s really bad. His only real hope is that the NDP vote is vastly overestimated in polling and that they’re not able to get the vote out. What’s more interesting to think about is how the Liberals will act in the next Parliament when it comes to supporting or forming a government. It’ll boil down to good old Liberal internal strife, so that’ll be exciting.
And of course, there’s the whole having to rebuild the party again. The Liberals have struggled to grow their base of support outside of Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. Now, they have even less of a hope in Quebec and are in danger of losing Atlantic Canada. And each of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal are seeing red ridings in danger of flipping to orange.
In retrospect, it’s pretty hilarious how Ignatieff and Duceppe kept on calling Layton out for considering his party a viable alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives. A lot of people wonder why he kept on presenting himself as this alternative and the genesis of that messaging comes from the 2004 election, where a large criticism of his campaign was that he wasn’t serious about running to form a government. And so, since 2006, the NDP have been trying to present themselves in that light, as hilarious as it may have seemed at the time.
Well, it looks like it finally paid off. That mindset seems to have pushed the NDP to make some organizational and strategic changes, the most notable of which has been in their push for Quebec. It’s kind of amazing how just having one MP in Quebec, even if he was pretty influential, was able to help their push into the province. The combination of Mulcair’s popularity and Layton’s performance in the debates created the conditions for that first Quebec poll that opened up this feedback loop of support.
Outside of Quebec, my guess is that there are enough people who wouldn’t mind voting NDP but never felt that the NDP would win in their riding or that the NDP would be effective as a third party. Now that they have a real shot at forming the Official Opposition, all of those people who would have liked to vote NDP now have their chance. In addition to these voters, we have people who never voted NDP before because they seemed kind of sketch, but now, they’re polling above the Liberals, so why not.
The challenge for the NDP, as it always has been, is to convert those polling numbers into votes. It’s helped that their polling has been on an upward trend even in the last few days of the campaign. By far the weakest aspect of the Quebec campaign for the NDP is the party organization on the ground, considering that up until pretty recently, there was almost none.
Much like the Conservatives, the Bloc Québecois really only needed to assert that they’re the only viable choice for Quebec. And Duceppe was probably right. There was still deep mistrust of the Liberals, Conservative ideology doesn’t really line up with the province’s, and the NDP was pretty much absent. Of course, it’s that last one that’s easiest to work with and once Layton started going for the province hard, people started to notice.
From my internet forum hangouts, I’ve come to realize that people don’t vote Bloc because they’re sovereigntists. People vote Bloc because they feel that it’s the party that defends their interests the best, regardless of whether how they feel about sovereignty. And it so happens that beyond the sovereignty question, the Bloc and NDP have a lot in common.
The Greens are all about the environment. Apparently, their economic policies are more laissez-faire than that of the Liberals, but it’s not like it matters. Honestly, I don’t know why people continue to think they can win any seats. Their support is spread across the country and not concentrated enough to get anyone elected. For the Greens, the campaign will largely be about the continuing adventures of Elizabeth May and trying to win her a seat.
I’ve got about 20 or so ridings I’m watching.
In BC, there’s Saanich—Gulf Islands, where Green Party leader Elizabeth May is taking on Conservative minister Gary Lunn. If she can’t do it, then the Green Party could be finished, since they appear to have poured in a ton of resources into that riding. The other interesting one is Vancouver South, where, in one of the narrowest victories in the country, Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh won by 20 votes against the Conservative in 2008.
In the rest of Western Canada, there’s Edmonton Strathcona, the Eye of Layton, held by Linda Duncan in a province otherwise painted in blue. In Manitoba, Winnipeg North is held by Liberal Kevin Lamoreaux, who took it in a byelection from the NDP a few months ago.
In Quebec, we’ve got Pontiac, where Conservative minister Lawrence Cannon looks like he could fall to an NDP scrub. While it looked like it would’ve been a tough fight, it looks like NDP Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair is going to hold on to Outremont pretty easily against former Liberal minister Martin Cauchon. And while they might seem safe, I’m a bit worried for Papineau (Justin Trudeau) and Westmount—Ville-Marie (Marc Garneau). There’s also some talk of Gilles Duceppe being on the defensive in his riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie
In Ontario, there are a ton of swing ridings. Guelph is a pretty tough fight with a ton of shenanigans going on. London North Centre is going to be my home in a few months and it could be danger zone for Glen Pearson. Peter Milliken’s departure makes Kingston and the Islands a really close fight. And there’s the super narrow victories in Kitchener Centre and Kitchener—Waterloo that the Conservatives will have a hard time defending. And I’ve heard rumours that Ottawa West—Nepean, home of John Baird, could be in play as well.
In the 905, there’s Ajax—Pickering, where Mark Holland is fighting off Chris Alexander. Ruby Dhalla looks like she’s going to lose Brampton—Springdale. I would really like for the Liberals to be able to retake Vaughan from Julian Fantino. And for a longshot, there’s Bev “not” Oda’s riding of Durham.
In Toronto, we’ve got York Centre, where Ken Dryden is somehow in danger. Joe Volpe is also in danger of losing Eglinton—Lawrence. Trinity—Spadina is usually a pretty tough fight, but the NDP boost is probably enough to keep Olivia Chow safe. Parkdale—High Park makes me sad, because both Gerard Kennedy and Peggy Nash have been excellent MPs. And of course, there’s my unexciting home riding of Scarborough—Rouge River.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s an election going on to determine who will be the king of the MEGABIGHUGECITY of Toronto. And as with most things about the municipal government of Toronto and the things it’s in charge of, it has turned out to be disappointing and depressing. It wasn’t always this way. In the earliest stages of the race, soon after David Miller, the current mayor of Toronto, announced that he would not seek re-election, everyone was like wow, maybe we’ll have an interesting and exciting race!
Back then, George Smitherman and John Tory were the frontrunners, with Adam Giambrone not far behind. Rocco Rossi seemed like a respectable candidate, while Rob Ford and Sarah Thomson were the lololol candidates. Then, one thing lead to another and John Tory decided he didn’t want to be liked by everyone but lose another election while Adam Giambrone was forced out because he cheated on his girlfriend. And so we are left with…
Rob Ford is currently the councillor for Ward 2 – Etobicoke North. He is famous for being angry at city council and saying terrible things. He’s pretty much adopted the McCain-Palin campaign strategy, because, well, he is essentially the embodiment of McCain and Palin.
He’s got McCain’s strange fixation on inconsequential spending while not having any sort of real plan to deal with, you know, real problems. He’s also got Palin’s knack for saying weird and dumb things and being irrationally angry at government. He’s got the bonus of just being an angry person in general.
Why is this depressing? Because at this point, he’s leading by a fair margin.
Joe Pantalone is currently councillor for Ward 19 – Trinity-Spadina and the Deputy Mayor of Toronto. He seems to be the most experienced and competent of the candidates still in the race and as a bonus, he’s the progressive of the bunch. Unfortunately for him, he’s one of Miller’s biggest allies on council, so that means he isn’t palpable with rage and is overshadowed by the other four candidates who are, they will assure you, very angry.
Rocco Rossi used to be the national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, but has never been elected to any public office. He started off the race seeming to be a decent alternative to John Tory. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, he felt the need to up the ante and that has lead him to make a bunch of insane announcements, like needlessly antagonizing anyone who doesn’t use a car or building a tunnel from Allen Road to downtown Toronto, evoking memories of some other failure in Toronto’s history.
George Smitherman was the MPP for Toronto Centre and Deputy Premier of Ontario, while holding a bunch of high-profile cabinet positions in Dalton McGuinty’s government. In the earliest stages of the race, he was the frontrunner until he actually had to start campaigning. I guess he figured it’d be easy or something because his campaign sucks and was totally blindsided by Rob Ford. Now, he’s trying to out-angry Rob Ford or something.
Sarah Thomson was a publisher and CEO. God only knows why she’s running for mayor, but somehow, she’s managed to stay above Joe Pantalone in the polls. She is slightly less angry than Smitherman or Ford and is slightly less insane than Rocco Rossi.
Hilariously, even after John Tory announced that he would not be running for mayor, John Tory is still the most popular candidate. John Tory is essentially one of those candidates that’s really popular and everyone knows he’s competent and wishes he’d be the guy, but for whatever reason, on election day, no one actually votes for him. This trend has occurred in the 2003 Toronto mayoral election, in the 2007 Ontario general election both as an MPP and as the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and finally in the 2009 by-election in Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock. I guess he decided that he didn’t feel like losing again so he’s punishing us by letting Rob Ford win.
At this point, if it were really close between Smitherman and Ford, I’d vote for Smitherman, because he’s not Rob Ford. Otherwise, I’ll throw in a vote for Pantalone and proceed to move to K-W forever.