This Stupid Election
It has all but confirmed that Doug Ford will call a provincial election tomorrow, with the vote to be held on Feb 27. I am very unhappy about this.
Ford says that he wants a new mandate because Trump is in power. This is a baldfaced lie. Ford already has a majority government, and does not need to (and is not supposed to) call an election until 2026.
My belief is that Ford is calling an election for two reasons: (a) he does not want the public to like Bonnie Crombie too much, and (b) Poilievre will force a federal election as early as March.
It is the second factor that is far more important. Poilievre and Ford are both Conservatives, but they are very different. PP has promised that the first days of his mandate will be disruptive; he has promised to end CBC funding, put pressures on municipalities to build homes, and get rid of the carbon tax almost immediately. My guess is that he will also slash government programs under the guise of "cutting waste". This will generate significant backlash, and Ford doesn't want any of it. The fact that Ford is worried about this backlash should be worrying for the rest of us as well. I do not believe PP is the same as Trump, but I firmly believe that his prime ministership will be incredibly disruptive. (And yet we are going to hand this guy a majority government? What are we thinking?
Perhaps a convenient third reason is that Trump is wreaking havoc in the USA right now, so Ford hopes that we will all be distracted with the disaster unfolding there instead of a boring Ontario election.
A fourth reason is proposed by the CBC: the federal Liberals are in a leadership race now, so many Liberals who might otherwise be available for the provincial election will be distracted campaigning for the next federal Liberal leader.
Ford doesn't need to call this election now, but he wants to save his own political skin, so here we are.
As I have written before, although I am not happy with Doug Ford's government it has been less of a clown car than I expected. The first few months with Dean French were ideological and rough, but Ford has shown himself to be a politician that wants to be liked, and he has backed down given sufficient opposition to his policies (from suburbanites). There are lots of things I do not like about the Doug Ford government (his obsessions with highways, his developer friends, and the primacy of cars are three) but not everything his government has done has been stupid.
I am no fan of Bonnie Crombie. Her main selling point is that she kept taxes low in Mississauga. She is probably more to the right of Doug Ford than Kathleen Wynne was left of the NDP, and that is saying a lot. I harbour a lot of anger towards the Liberals given their 2007 betrayal on electoral reform, and I have not and will not forgive them for that.
Suffice to say that I am a fan of neither a Liberal government nor a Conservative one for the next five years, but at this point I do not consider either prospect an existential threat. However, I would like Ford to be punished for calling an early election.
I had hoped the NDP would be a force, but I think Marit Stiles is headed straight towards third party status. It doesn't help that the NDP is being wracked with infighting over Sarah Jama.
Local Irritations
Both Colleen James and Rob Deutschmann have decided to run for the provincial Liberals. James has taken a leave of absence and Deutschmann has stepped down. This continues the trend of freshly-elected municipal politicians jumping ship to further their own careers. Both lasted longer in their positions than Aislinn Clancy, but neither had the principles to serve a full term in office.
I wonder whether Deutschmann is planning another run for Regional Chair if he loses the provincial election. I would very much like Karen Redman to lose the job, but that does not mean I support Deutschmann as a replacement.
I hoped that Kitchener Centre would be a straightforward vote, given that Clancy is our MPP. I don't like Clancy at all, but I was thinking she was the best option to avoid electing a Liberal or a Conservative in the riding. But now it looks like Kitchener Centre is going to be a mess. Clancy is contesting her seat, desperately trying to convince us she accomplished something during her time as an MPP. Colleen James is black and so gets the diversity cred. Both are strong campaigners (I would argue much stronger campaigners than effective representatives) so Kitchener Centre could be bombarded with messaging. Then there is the NDP, which is running former Ward 9 candidate Brooklin Wallis in the riding. Wallis is trans, so all the leftists are going to be clawing each other's eyes out to win the Oppression Olympics and argue that their candidate is most deserving. This sucks, because once again there is a great opportunity for the Progressive Conservative candidate to slip up the middle. It is true that this didn't happen for the byelection between Clancy and Debbie Chapman, but it was a possibility then and could well be a possibility now.
I am so sick of all of this.