I am reminded of a story I once read about Emperor Napoleon, who was considering whether to promote one of his generals to the rank of Marshal and he asked his advisors whether the general had the qualities to be a Marshal. "He is brave as a lion," said one advisor. "He's very smart", said another, "and rarely makes mistakes." A third pointed to his charisma and said that his troops adored him.
"Yes, yes," said the Emperor impatiently. "That's all very well, but is he LUCKY?"
Doug Ford may be a lot of things, but he isn't an ideologue. One of The Line editors, I think, nailed it when they said that he isn't a politician, he's a salesman -- one that wants to do whatever deal is in front of him.
That is reflected in the flip-flops in policy as he seems to follow public opinion. Sometimes it felt like Ontario crowdsourced our COVID response in slow motion. The government would do a thing. Polling would show the public hated it; experts would explain why it was a terrible idea. A week or two later, the government would flip flop, repeating the process until things got better and/or public opinion settled down. Ideologues don't do that.
It's a pretty inefficient way to govern. Moreover, this Ontarian is left with a strong sense that certain groups (donors, big companies with good GR teams) tend to get a lot more "deals" than anybody else. It's probably why Costco and Walmart seemed to be impacted the least by pandemic restrictions while Mom-and-Pop shops had to figure out curbside service. It's probably why we're getting a new highway that nobody except a small group of developers (and probably construction companies) want. I'd call it corrupt, except I honestly think it's just Doug trying to get a deal -- running Ontario like its a super-sized label company.
What's significant about this election is that the PCs took ridings from the NDP, which doesn't happen very often in Ontario and points to a real shift as places where skilled trades or manufacturing are important start to look at the PCs. They earned that shift, it's no fluke. The labour minister has worked hard over a number of years on programs to promote skilled trades and built real relationships. A lot might be odd about this election, but those wins were the result of some hard work and good strategy. We'll see if they can hold those ridings.
If I'm not mistaken, most if not all of those ridings were already conservative. I don't think this was a decisive issue in the election even if I think it's a terrible piece of public policy. I suspect local feelings may shift when bulldozers arrive, but we'll see.
The majority of the local municipalities who would be impacted by the highway oppose the project. But, the trucking association is for it. This is more about addressing truck congestion on the 401 than it is about moving commuters. The truck issue is real as the high costs of the 407 mean they mainly take (and clog) the 401 across the top of Toronto. But, the government could subsidize truck traffic on on the 407 (which has capacity), likely a a much lower cost than building the 413.
What the 413 *does* do is make a bunch of land owned by developer donors more valuable. Which is a terrible reason to invest $$$ in public money!
The PCs were also helped with blue-collars by their less rabid denunciations of the trucker convoys and (somewhat) less extreme Covid approach than the Libs or NDP.
I will agree that the Science table projected information in a poor manner at times....for example suggesting worst-case scenarios when no actions were taken...while actions were already being taken, which hurt their credibility. However, their predictions on what would happen if restrictions weren't increased were quite accurate. And there was Dr Brown's spectacular press conference....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETHcPaoCxkA
I honestly can't remember but by then Ontario wasn't doing any significant testing, so no one knew what the actual numbers were. I'd be really interested if we're in a similar to state to the UK though.
Not sure I entirely agree. They ejected several MPs from caucus for their unwillingness to vote with the government on COVID restrictions. One of them (and her husband) created a new party (Blue) which I believe ran candidates in every riding. That and Derek Sloan's Ontario Party were there for folks who lean towards anti-lockdown/trucker convoy sympathy. As you pointed out, they picked up some votes, but none won any seats.
They also booted Randy Hillier from caucus and he was quite active in the trucker convey.
Having done that, the PCs increased seats this election and managed to win some former NDP/Liberal ridings. So, whatever they lost to Blue/Ontario seemed more than worth it.
I get where you are going (the 'culture' side) but lots of right wing parties in Canada have tried that and lost (e.g. the federal Conservatives). The Ontario PCs did the hard work of developing programs that some folks in organized labour liked and, more importantly, signalled that working issues were on their radar. For example, they just launched a new law to allow people to disconnect from work (not get emails/requests out of working hours) which isn't even particularly a blue collar thing. They've really put an effort over the last few years to develop a conservative approch to labour issues, mostly under the Monte McNaughton.
What's key here is that this government will now have to go into negotiations with a bunch of public sector unions and will be looking to keep costs in-line. By making inroads with private sector unions, they may have helped seperate out public and private sector unions, which is aventagous to them as they have to battle nurses, for example.
The general consensus is this government is a bunch of buffoons. And, there is lots of evidence of that. But, they have also done some smart things on files that aren't as high profile -- like labour -- that seem to be paying off. Also -- see their work on intellectual property; this isn't just a 'focus on blue collar workers' thing, though that's part of it.
Splitting private sector unions from public sector unions politically would be great. In any reasonably open economy, private sector unions have to behave with some degree of responsibility, lest the underlying business go down. Public sector unions face no such constraint.
Covid isn't over until discrimination against unvaccinated people ends entirely. Ontario could easily protect its citizens from federal persecution (eg travel bans, which are very much still real) simply by protecting medical privacy and refusing to issue public secure vaccination certificates. Or by issuing them to everyone who wants one, regardless of their medical records. Or by simply fining companies who discriminate, as Florida does, federally regulated or not.
Covid wasn't a factor in this election because, instead of calling out the Conservatives on their extensive violations of our Charter rights for useless Covid theatre policies, the main opposition parties criticized them for not doing more harm, and in fact promised to do more harm themselves if they got the chance.
But really, was Covid not a factor? New Blue and Ontario, which are pretty much Covid anti-narrative parties, got nearly as many votes as the Greens, despite being brand new. Sure, this didn't change the result (partly because many people who objected to our Covid rights violations and discrimination stuck with Ford as the best of a bad lot), but there have been many elections where a 4-5% swing would make a difference.
Ontario has no restrictions in place. For the province, it's over....well, until the fall. Anti-COVID parties are like the PPC. They'll have nothing to talk about come the next election, and remain irrelevant.
COVID has a mind of its own. The state of hospitals will determine what happens next provincially. If a new variant arrives in the fall, I hope he'll take prompt action so he doesn't have to drop the hammer I don't believe he will and our health care system won't likely survive another one. I have no idea what Trudeau is currently thinking because whatever explanation he attempted was like his answering a question....void of value.
Trudeau is thinking that enough people in his voter universe support his travel ban that it is helping him, or at least not hurting, politically. And that's all the thinking that there ever was.
So far, COVID's mind has never invented a variant that can get around existing vaccination well enough to give anybody under 75 a real fear of hospital and injury. If somewhere around the world, such a variant arises, it's basically a new pandemic. Absent a "whole new COVID", it's over.
The odds of that are much higher than the 1% odds of a completely new pandemic (another 1918 flu can happen any year), but I'd lay serious money on a bet that it is indeed politically over, no longer able to compel pols to call for significant sacrifices - and give you 3:1 odds.
I think you're right. Politically it's over unless one more mutation becomes significantly stronger...which seems unlikely. I don't think it's hurting Trudeau at all. Everything else he's doing/not doing on the other hand......We'll know this fall.
So good. Especially the observation on the conservative strategic case that the left is imploding due to its shift from class-based politics to a bourgeois posturing on race and gender, promoted in lifeless, boilerplate language that nobody actually speaks in regular conversation. (Okay, so I embellish.) I'm on the left and this drives me bananas.
Also, excellent observations about Twitter, and, well, everything. This surely will put to rest any suggestion that The Line is anything other than common sense centrist. (Though, naturally, that's my bias.)
"Better the devil you know than the one you don't". The vacuum of leadership in Ontario could Hoover all the water out of the oceans. All the choices were terrible, and people simply couldn't find enough nose plugs to protect themselves in the voting booth. The turnout is an Ontario disgrace really. Elections should still matter....in the US they soon won't. I wonder how we'll feel when that comes here. But back to the topic, Ontario gets a new $10 billion highway it doesn't really need, and Doug's friends with real estate get a boatload of tax dollars. There is no plan, no fiscal responsibility, no vision, and really, very little hope for Ontario in the future...I suspect the reality being they don't know where to start to solve the problems. You can't get elected telling the truth....so say nothing, and hope for the best. It worked great for Doug....twice. I wonder who the new faces will be next time. Hopefully, they come with a vision and no baggage.
This must be Jen Gerson: "Writing critically about the Liberal campaign today feels a little bit like flogging a dead horse, and then shooting it a bunch of times, and then setting it on fire, and then hunting down all of its little horsey relatives and shooting all of them too. And then peeing on them."
I think the editors missed an aspect upon which Dwight Duncan remarked during the TVO broadcast: the Trudeau effect. Duncan said that a sizeable percentage of the people he met at doors (in Windsor, which is not exactly a conservative hotbed) cited exasperation with Trudeau as the reason they'd vote for Ford. The stink of the federal Liberal brand seems to be rubbing off on their provincial counterparts. That ought to have been worth a mention in this postmortem.
Excellent as ever - I would only like to add one thought. Your comment here:
>>
And this is the real trap of the website. Twitter gives people the illusion of social or political engagement, but not the reality of the thing. It gives people the high of activism without the work or the results. Social media has created a simulacrum of the real world, one that sucks real energy, time and emotional investment, and redirects those finite resources toward its own parasitic advancement.
>>
Reminded me of one of the best definitions of pornography: "The high without the work or the results."
As true for cake decorating shows as for twitter debates about [pick your issue].
I think the exact quote is Dave Chappelle's: "Twitter is not a real place." As a recovering economist, I share joint ownership in "That's not how this works. That's not how anything works!" But nobody has believed me since 2008.
Some painful truth-telling to all sides in this one, for which much applause is due. Best "hot take" I've read today.
However he won, I take great pride in a country where this can happen, and only those twitting fringers think that doom is at hand. A Canadian election should steer the ship of state another five points to the right or left, not take it through a 180. I think that Ford gets that, at least. (I'm clinging, no-doubt bitterly, to the belief that Ford made himself acceptable by greatly moderating what "Doug Ford" meant to people.)
In recent elections, interior BC ridings acquired a new Conservative MP, though over 60% of the votes went to parties to their left. In the States, this would be proof that the left-side parties must all unite and not split the Left Vote, not let the dreaded Right have a win. In Canada, there's just not enough dread and hate of the other side.
It is hard to read an analysis of the Ontario election without reference to Proportional Representation. Most Ontarians voted AGAINST Ford and would have preferred a coalition of the Left like we have Federally. Our system makes Ford the winner but he wouldn't be in power in most democracies. We need long-term policies and a more cooperative and collaborative leadership to represent the public. Honest question: how low does voter turnout have to go before we decide we need to tweak something in order to make people believe in politics again?
Kudos to The Editor on this “Special Dispatch”.I laughed, I cried, my spirits rose. Truly an entertaining and educational piece of writing. Well worth the “cost of admission”. Thank you.
Dale, I believe that the "price of admission" to The Line is incredibly modest.
Matt / Jen, I really hesitate to say this but I would (owie!) pay more. As always, this is very well done. And I live in Alberta, not in the center of the universe or it's environs.
The long tail story here is that the Ontario Liberals are quickly becoming as marginal a provincial party in Ontario as they are in the Prairies. The NDP vs everyone who hate the NDP polarity is moving east.
Ontario does not need two, or three, left wing parties (counting the Green Zealots). The Ontario Liberal Party could dissolve tomorrow and the Left would still have ample representation in the NDP. The rally cry every four years should be “Remember McGuinty and Wynne”, that should about do it for a generation.
I am reminded of a story I once read about Emperor Napoleon, who was considering whether to promote one of his generals to the rank of Marshal and he asked his advisors whether the general had the qualities to be a Marshal. "He is brave as a lion," said one advisor. "He's very smart", said another, "and rarely makes mistakes." A third pointed to his charisma and said that his troops adored him.
"Yes, yes," said the Emperor impatiently. "That's all very well, but is he LUCKY?"
Doug Ford may be a lot of things, but he isn't an ideologue. One of The Line editors, I think, nailed it when they said that he isn't a politician, he's a salesman -- one that wants to do whatever deal is in front of him.
That is reflected in the flip-flops in policy as he seems to follow public opinion. Sometimes it felt like Ontario crowdsourced our COVID response in slow motion. The government would do a thing. Polling would show the public hated it; experts would explain why it was a terrible idea. A week or two later, the government would flip flop, repeating the process until things got better and/or public opinion settled down. Ideologues don't do that.
It's a pretty inefficient way to govern. Moreover, this Ontarian is left with a strong sense that certain groups (donors, big companies with good GR teams) tend to get a lot more "deals" than anybody else. It's probably why Costco and Walmart seemed to be impacted the least by pandemic restrictions while Mom-and-Pop shops had to figure out curbside service. It's probably why we're getting a new highway that nobody except a small group of developers (and probably construction companies) want. I'd call it corrupt, except I honestly think it's just Doug trying to get a deal -- running Ontario like its a super-sized label company.
What's significant about this election is that the PCs took ridings from the NDP, which doesn't happen very often in Ontario and points to a real shift as places where skilled trades or manufacturing are important start to look at the PCs. They earned that shift, it's no fluke. The labour minister has worked hard over a number of years on programs to promote skilled trades and built real relationships. A lot might be odd about this election, but those wins were the result of some hard work and good strategy. We'll see if they can hold those ridings.
FYI the highway that nobody wants -- elected PC MPP's in every riding that the highway touches.
If I'm not mistaken, most if not all of those ridings were already conservative. I don't think this was a decisive issue in the election even if I think it's a terrible piece of public policy. I suspect local feelings may shift when bulldozers arrive, but we'll see.
The majority of the local municipalities who would be impacted by the highway oppose the project. But, the trucking association is for it. This is more about addressing truck congestion on the 401 than it is about moving commuters. The truck issue is real as the high costs of the 407 mean they mainly take (and clog) the 401 across the top of Toronto. But, the government could subsidize truck traffic on on the 407 (which has capacity), likely a a much lower cost than building the 413.
What the 413 *does* do is make a bunch of land owned by developer donors more valuable. Which is a terrible reason to invest $$$ in public money!
So by "nobody wants new highway" you really meant you and the downtown Toronto folks.
Nice strawman!
The PCs were also helped with blue-collars by their less rabid denunciations of the trucker convoys and (somewhat) less extreme Covid approach than the Libs or NDP.
Doug just made Ontario's COVID situation worse every time by ignoring the Science Table. Shut downs of weeks became months because he dawdled.
The Science table was wrong by an order of magnitude on almost every projection they made, as I recall. Not to say Ford was right all the time either.
I will agree that the Science table projected information in a poor manner at times....for example suggesting worst-case scenarios when no actions were taken...while actions were already being taken, which hurt their credibility. However, their predictions on what would happen if restrictions weren't increased were quite accurate. And there was Dr Brown's spectacular press conference....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETHcPaoCxkA
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Ontario best the OST's best-case Omicron model?
I honestly can't remember but by then Ontario wasn't doing any significant testing, so no one knew what the actual numbers were. I'd be really interested if we're in a similar to state to the UK though.
even a broken clock...
Not sure I entirely agree. They ejected several MPs from caucus for their unwillingness to vote with the government on COVID restrictions. One of them (and her husband) created a new party (Blue) which I believe ran candidates in every riding. That and Derek Sloan's Ontario Party were there for folks who lean towards anti-lockdown/trucker convoy sympathy. As you pointed out, they picked up some votes, but none won any seats.
They also booted Randy Hillier from caucus and he was quite active in the trucker convey.
Having done that, the PCs increased seats this election and managed to win some former NDP/Liberal ridings. So, whatever they lost to Blue/Ontario seemed more than worth it.
I get where you are going (the 'culture' side) but lots of right wing parties in Canada have tried that and lost (e.g. the federal Conservatives). The Ontario PCs did the hard work of developing programs that some folks in organized labour liked and, more importantly, signalled that working issues were on their radar. For example, they just launched a new law to allow people to disconnect from work (not get emails/requests out of working hours) which isn't even particularly a blue collar thing. They've really put an effort over the last few years to develop a conservative approch to labour issues, mostly under the Monte McNaughton.
What's key here is that this government will now have to go into negotiations with a bunch of public sector unions and will be looking to keep costs in-line. By making inroads with private sector unions, they may have helped seperate out public and private sector unions, which is aventagous to them as they have to battle nurses, for example.
The general consensus is this government is a bunch of buffoons. And, there is lots of evidence of that. But, they have also done some smart things on files that aren't as high profile -- like labour -- that seem to be paying off. Also -- see their work on intellectual property; this isn't just a 'focus on blue collar workers' thing, though that's part of it.
Splitting private sector unions from public sector unions politically would be great. In any reasonably open economy, private sector unions have to behave with some degree of responsibility, lest the underlying business go down. Public sector unions face no such constraint.
Covid isn't over until discrimination against unvaccinated people ends entirely. Ontario could easily protect its citizens from federal persecution (eg travel bans, which are very much still real) simply by protecting medical privacy and refusing to issue public secure vaccination certificates. Or by issuing them to everyone who wants one, regardless of their medical records. Or by simply fining companies who discriminate, as Florida does, federally regulated or not.
Covid wasn't a factor in this election because, instead of calling out the Conservatives on their extensive violations of our Charter rights for useless Covid theatre policies, the main opposition parties criticized them for not doing more harm, and in fact promised to do more harm themselves if they got the chance.
But really, was Covid not a factor? New Blue and Ontario, which are pretty much Covid anti-narrative parties, got nearly as many votes as the Greens, despite being brand new. Sure, this didn't change the result (partly because many people who objected to our Covid rights violations and discrimination stuck with Ford as the best of a bad lot), but there have been many elections where a 4-5% swing would make a difference.
Ontario has no restrictions in place. For the province, it's over....well, until the fall. Anti-COVID parties are like the PPC. They'll have nothing to talk about come the next election, and remain irrelevant.
I certainly hope so! But, as you note, restrictions could come back. And the liberals threatened to bring them back immediately.
COVID has a mind of its own. The state of hospitals will determine what happens next provincially. If a new variant arrives in the fall, I hope he'll take prompt action so he doesn't have to drop the hammer I don't believe he will and our health care system won't likely survive another one. I have no idea what Trudeau is currently thinking because whatever explanation he attempted was like his answering a question....void of value.
Trudeau is thinking that enough people in his voter universe support his travel ban that it is helping him, or at least not hurting, politically. And that's all the thinking that there ever was.
So far, COVID's mind has never invented a variant that can get around existing vaccination well enough to give anybody under 75 a real fear of hospital and injury. If somewhere around the world, such a variant arises, it's basically a new pandemic. Absent a "whole new COVID", it's over.
The odds of that are much higher than the 1% odds of a completely new pandemic (another 1918 flu can happen any year), but I'd lay serious money on a bet that it is indeed politically over, no longer able to compel pols to call for significant sacrifices - and give you 3:1 odds.
I think you're right. Politically it's over unless one more mutation becomes significantly stronger...which seems unlikely. I don't think it's hurting Trudeau at all. Everything else he's doing/not doing on the other hand......We'll know this fall.
Sacrifices by people, or sacrifices of people? The latter is still going on.
So good. Especially the observation on the conservative strategic case that the left is imploding due to its shift from class-based politics to a bourgeois posturing on race and gender, promoted in lifeless, boilerplate language that nobody actually speaks in regular conversation. (Okay, so I embellish.) I'm on the left and this drives me bananas.
Also, excellent observations about Twitter, and, well, everything. This surely will put to rest any suggestion that The Line is anything other than common sense centrist. (Though, naturally, that's my bias.)
"Better the devil you know than the one you don't". The vacuum of leadership in Ontario could Hoover all the water out of the oceans. All the choices were terrible, and people simply couldn't find enough nose plugs to protect themselves in the voting booth. The turnout is an Ontario disgrace really. Elections should still matter....in the US they soon won't. I wonder how we'll feel when that comes here. But back to the topic, Ontario gets a new $10 billion highway it doesn't really need, and Doug's friends with real estate get a boatload of tax dollars. There is no plan, no fiscal responsibility, no vision, and really, very little hope for Ontario in the future...I suspect the reality being they don't know where to start to solve the problems. You can't get elected telling the truth....so say nothing, and hope for the best. It worked great for Doug....twice. I wonder who the new faces will be next time. Hopefully, they come with a vision and no baggage.
This must be Jen Gerson: "Writing critically about the Liberal campaign today feels a little bit like flogging a dead horse, and then shooting it a bunch of times, and then setting it on fire, and then hunting down all of its little horsey relatives and shooting all of them too. And then peeing on them."
I love the gersonisims!
Nope!
I thought 'peeing on them' was Jen too.
Well I’ll be…. Then that’s one fine and descriptive piece of sentence writing!
I think the editors missed an aspect upon which Dwight Duncan remarked during the TVO broadcast: the Trudeau effect. Duncan said that a sizeable percentage of the people he met at doors (in Windsor, which is not exactly a conservative hotbed) cited exasperation with Trudeau as the reason they'd vote for Ford. The stink of the federal Liberal brand seems to be rubbing off on their provincial counterparts. That ought to have been worth a mention in this postmortem.
Didn’t miss this. Will have something in this soon. Need to check some numbers.
Excellent as ever - I would only like to add one thought. Your comment here:
>>
And this is the real trap of the website. Twitter gives people the illusion of social or political engagement, but not the reality of the thing. It gives people the high of activism without the work or the results. Social media has created a simulacrum of the real world, one that sucks real energy, time and emotional investment, and redirects those finite resources toward its own parasitic advancement.
>>
Reminded me of one of the best definitions of pornography: "The high without the work or the results."
As true for cake decorating shows as for twitter debates about [pick your issue].
I think the exact quote is Dave Chappelle's: "Twitter is not a real place." As a recovering economist, I share joint ownership in "That's not how this works. That's not how anything works!" But nobody has believed me since 2008.
Some painful truth-telling to all sides in this one, for which much applause is due. Best "hot take" I've read today.
However he won, I take great pride in a country where this can happen, and only those twitting fringers think that doom is at hand. A Canadian election should steer the ship of state another five points to the right or left, not take it through a 180. I think that Ford gets that, at least. (I'm clinging, no-doubt bitterly, to the belief that Ford made himself acceptable by greatly moderating what "Doug Ford" meant to people.)
In recent elections, interior BC ridings acquired a new Conservative MP, though over 60% of the votes went to parties to their left. In the States, this would be proof that the left-side parties must all unite and not split the Left Vote, not let the dreaded Right have a win. In Canada, there's just not enough dread and hate of the other side.
It is hard to read an analysis of the Ontario election without reference to Proportional Representation. Most Ontarians voted AGAINST Ford and would have preferred a coalition of the Left like we have Federally. Our system makes Ford the winner but he wouldn't be in power in most democracies. We need long-term policies and a more cooperative and collaborative leadership to represent the public. Honest question: how low does voter turnout have to go before we decide we need to tweak something in order to make people believe in politics again?
Kudos to The Editor on this “Special Dispatch”.I laughed, I cried, my spirits rose. Truly an entertaining and educational piece of writing. Well worth the “cost of admission”. Thank you.
Dale, I believe that the "price of admission" to The Line is incredibly modest.
Matt / Jen, I really hesitate to say this but I would (owie!) pay more. As always, this is very well done. And I live in Alberta, not in the center of the universe or it's environs.
The long tail story here is that the Ontario Liberals are quickly becoming as marginal a provincial party in Ontario as they are in the Prairies. The NDP vs everyone who hate the NDP polarity is moving east.
These Twitter paragraphs are just fantastic. Bravo.
I'm 99.5% certain that the "murderclowns" (and general Twitter commentary) is attributable to a certain polisci prof in SW Ontario.
This fucking thing just goes on and on and on...
We thought you unsubscribed.
🤣
Ontario does not need two, or three, left wing parties (counting the Green Zealots). The Ontario Liberal Party could dissolve tomorrow and the Left would still have ample representation in the NDP. The rally cry every four years should be “Remember McGuinty and Wynne”, that should about do it for a generation.