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THE LIBERAL BRAND IS STRONG – and other lessons from the Ontario election

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June 13, 2014

THE LIBERAL BRAND IS STRONG – and other lessons from the Ontario election

By Andrew Cardozo

It was a surprising outcome to most people including some of the best pollsters I spoke to earlier this week. And there are lots of lessons to be learned from it.

1. The hard core conservative message did not work as some thought it would. Ontario is not moving to the right as writers Daryl Bricker and John Ibbitson suggested in The Big Shift. The 905 belt and many small and mid-sized Ontario cities stayed Liberal or NDP with decidedly progressive platforms.

2. The Liberals held the GTA, ethnic vote and all. The 905 has not deserted the Grits as seemed to be the case in the last federal election – and what really happened there was that the Liberal vote either stayed home or went NDP, allowing the Harper Conservatives to slip up the middle. Didn’t happen this time.

3. Apologies and coming clean works. Kathleen Wynne took responsibility for the gas plant fiasco and promised better and enough voters were prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt – doubt that her opponents tried hard to sow. She also knows that Liberals across the province want no more of the shenanigans of the gas plants – they did not appreciate having to defend the indefensible, door after door. Senior Liberal operatives just have to take taxpayers seriously and not settle issues at any cost and Liberalism has to have higher standards. They also want her to rein in the arm’s length agencies which have been the cause of most problems – ORNGE, e-health, exorbitant expense claims from agency CEOs, etc.

4. Progressive works in Ontario. The recent budget, which is best described as a Liberal-NDP budget was on trial and survived. May be Justin Trudeau’s stands on abortion and marijuana may not be so out of step.

5. Negative ads work – but not unfair attack ads. Wynne took the attacks from her opponents and gave back equally – “100,000 Ontarians are going to be thrown out of work”. No one was stupidly accused of “just visiting”, but attacks on her personality, “Kathleen you have changed”, just didn’t catch on.

6. Justin Trudeau made two personal appearances with Wynne – one in the riding of Trinity-Spadina, where there is a concurrent federal by-election, the other in Ottawa-West Nepean, which was supposed to be very close. He also sent out a mass letter on election day. Since becoming leader he also campaigned for Stephen McNeil in Nova Scotia, where the provincial Liberals won big. Trudeau is proving to be a popular commodity on the campaign trail, perhaps even with “good judgement”, not averse to risk.

7. Last year we had a historic high of six woman premiers, and we could have been down to one, but the Ontario electorate elected a woman premier for the first time, and now with Christie Clark of B.C., we have two women elected to lead solid majority governments.

8. Likewise, sexual orientation is not a political issue any longer. A solitary voter said to me he had always been a Liberal voter, but didn’t agree with the Liberal leader’s lifestyle, to which I responded, “What have you got against grandmothers in politics?” This is a progressive province.

9. The unions. A number of unions are becoming more pragmatic and recognize that only supporting the NDP is not in their best interests, especially when the Tories go hard right. As they support both the NDP and the Liberals, the latter need to engage more meaningfully with the labour movement, as a force for a progressive society which goes well beyond their own pocket books.

10. For the NDP, endless and even right-wing-style populist attacks on the Liberals didn’t work. The NDP held their own, but did not eat into Liberal support by attacking them, and just as much, Wynne did not take away NDP votes despite her targeted pelas to them – although one could say she stemmed any tide of progressive votes away from her party to the left. A lesson for the federal NDP. Died-in-the-wool New Democrats tend to loathe right wing Tories much more than they do Liberals, especially if they are progressive.

11. Not that I’m arguing for a merger of any parties but the two parties that would normally support the “Liberal-NDP budget” got 62% of the vote (38.7% and 23.8% respectively), and add another 5% for the Greens, versus 31% for the strongly conservative message.

12. The Greens! The Greens! They doubled their vote from 2.9 to 4.9%. Liberals need to look at this closely. Time to consider a new kind of deep-seeded green shift, which includes environmental issues as well as better ethical behavior.

13. Any thoughts of a snap federal election being called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper this fall will be put to rest. The “stable, Conservative majority government” is surely a better bet than trying for another one now. Truly, a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.

14. But more importantly, a second majority government seems less certain even with a 2015 election, which brings me back to a prediction I put forward last year. Stephen Harper will look at this and decide this is the year to step down and hand his successor enough time before the next election.

15. The Liberal brand remains strong and getting stronger. If the Liberals could pull off a win after the problems of the last year of the McGuinty government (and the first eight McGuinty years were very productive), it suggests Ontarians are comfortable with the brand, and the role it plays. Lesson to the federal Liberals, give voters something to believe it and they will respond.

Andrew Cardozo is president of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Policy and is an adjunct professor at Carleton University.

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