It’s been more than a month since the provincial election
happened. I was tempted to write about it right away but I decided to let the
dust settle, let all the stats roll in and see what kind of story they told.
This is my interpretation of the story.
In retrospect, Premier Kathleen Wynne looks like a genius
for calling an election. Not only did her party win, but they won a majority,
which means they will be able to do a lot more on their own, without needing
the NDP as a partner. Wynne called an election (technically she asked the lieutenant
governor to call the election), when the NDP announced they would be voting
against the Liberal’s proposed budget. According to Andrea Horwath (NDP
leader), this was because the budget was a ‘mad dash to escape all the scandals
by promising the moon and the stars’, and that the Liberals still hadn’t kept
last year’s budget promises. She didn’t trust the Liberals any more, and she
didn’t think the people did either.
So what happened? I personally believe that all it would have
taken was one viable candidate, someone the people could believe in, and this
would have been a completely different story. The voters wanted the Liberals
gone, they were tired of hearing how their tax money was wasted and projects
were being cancelled. Unfortunately this election, like so many others, turned
into “who do we dislike the least?” Instead of voting for the person who’s
values and plan we believed in (which was no one’s), voters chose the lesser of
3 (or 4 if you count the green party) evils – the one they already knew.
Tim Hudak (leader of the Conservatives) focused his campaign
around his proposed Million Jobs plan. Basically he was going to reduce tax,
government services, energy costs, and regulations to create jobs. Sounds pretty
good right? The problem was that there were severe mathematical errors with his
calculations. I’m pretty sure they just picked a number out of the air. For
one, there aren’t a million unemployed people in Ontario. It’s around 600,000
as of December. But hey, overreaching when it comes to jobs isn’t the worst
thing in the world. Secondly, experts said that even if the PCs data was
correct, their plan would only create 50,000 jobs, after taking out the 500,000
jobs that would be created without any policy change. Tim Hudak’s response went
like this: “We can have a great argument over whether it’s going to create
80,000, 100,000, 120,000 or 150,000 jobs, the bottom line is, it’s going to
create jobs”. Well actually it does matter because part of the Million Jobs
plan is to cut 100,000 public sector jobs, so if the plan only creates 80,000
jobs then we are actually down 20,000 jobs. Besides even 150,000 jobs is a long
way from the proposed 1 million. All in all, Ontarians weren’t buying what
Hudak was selling and the Conservatives got beat up badly at the polls. Tim
Hudak quickly stepped down as the Conservative leader.
Andrea Horwath was always in a tough situation. She lurched
her party to the right in an attempt to pick up Conservative voters and upset
much of her party. She tried to tell the voters that they didn’t have to choose
between “bad ethics and bad math” but the NDP spent most of the election
watching from the sidelines. Last year she was criticized for supporting the
Liberal budget, with some saying she was an accomplice in the power plant
fiasco. This year she was criticized for not supporting the Liberal budget. It
was a lose-lose race for the NDP.
While the Conservative economic plan centered more around
cutting government spending (similar to austerity measures), the Liberal economic plan centered around increased government spending, particularly on
infrastructure projects. Much of this was also focused on transportation,
including several LRT (high speed rail) systems, like the one currently being
built in Ottawa. While the Liberals were swimming in scandals, it helped that
all of that happened under Dalton McGuinty’s watch, and that Wynne was a fairly
fresh face.
It was certainly a lot of milestones. Wynne is the first elected
female premier of Ontario and Canada’s first openly gay premier. This is the
Liberals 4th consecutive win (starting in 2003) and they flipped
some big ridings, like my current riding of Trinity-Spadina in downtown
Toronto, which had been NDP for 24 years previously. Interestingly, this loss
was not because of a decrease in NDP votes (the candidate did about the same as
in 2011), but it is because of the huge jump in the number of people voting.
Trinity-Spadina had the highest increase in voter turnout in the province, at
23%, and it looks like most of those people voted Liberal. This increase in
voter turnout was consistent across the province with 52% of the eligible voters
coming to the polls – almost 4% higher than the last election – and reversing a
declining trend since 1990. However Ontario still has one of the lowest
turnouts in the country, especially when compared to Quebec’s recent election
which attracted 71% of voters.
The last interesting statistic I want to share, is the
number of declined ballots. A declined ballot is when the voter actively tells
the polling officer that they are declining to vote. 31,399 people declined to
vote this year, compared to 2,335 declined votes in 2011. That’s a lot of
people saying that they don’t want any of these people in charge. We will have
to see what the Liberals do now that they have a majority government.
