Stupid Election Aftermath
As I write this we are just about to move to a new phase of politics: the Federal Liberals will choose their new leader, and then it will be federal election season. Provincial election season ended about 10 days ago. I hope this entry will not be too long, but I feel obligated to write down a few thoughts.
Conservative Majority
Doug Ford got everything he wanted. He now has a huge majority, which he will relay into all kinds of dumb policies: building Highway 413, restricting bike lanes, privatizing health care, opposing climate action, and making alcohol more accessible. Most importantly, he avoided the backlash that the Poilievre government will generate, which I remain convinced is why he called this election in the first place.
Above all, the OPCs demonstrated that accountability doesn't matter. The Conservatives released their election platform three days before Election Day, and it was not terribly substansive. Conservative candidates for office did not attend all-candidates meetings or interact with the media. Doug Ford himself kept his interactions to a minimum; after the English-language debates he avoided reporter scrums. His campaign consisted of avoiding accountability, and that worked out great for him.
The people who defend First Past the Post keep crowing about how local MPPs provide "local representation", but this has been proven to be a complete and utter lie. I am not even sure the Kitchener Centre candidate Rob Elliott set foot in the riding (although surely he canvassed?), but he still finished second, because voters care about leaders and parties, not about local candidates.
Now we will have a federal election and the federal Conservatives will run the same playbook, very likely with the same result.
It bothers me that this guy has a majority government until 2029. Many climate change commitments come due in 2030, and it is utterly clear that (in Ontario at least) we will not hit any targets we set.
Vote Distortions
If there is a party that is celebrating First Past the Post, it ought to be the NDP. They won 27 seats on 18.6% of the vote, while the Liberals only won 14 on 29.9% of the vote. That means the NDP is again the official opposition, for whatever that is worth.
Meanwhile the Liberals are again the third place party. The schadenfreude is high. It is the Liberals' fault that we are still running elections under First Past the Post, and part of me would be quite content for them to be the third place party in Ontario indefinitely. Call me petty, but I would have been content had they missed the threshold for official party status again. If a Poilievre government in Ottawa wasn't such an existential threat, then I would wish the same federally as well. A pox on the Liberal party.
The Greens got most of they wanted. They wanted three seats (Guelph, Kitchener Centre, and Muskoka-Parry Sound) and got two of them. That is nothing to celebrate, but it would have been much worse for them had Aislinn Clancy lost Kitchener Centre.
The Record published an article about how Catherine Fife was tired of vote-splitting on the left. I don't think anything will come of this, but who knows?
Voter turnout was about as abysmal as in 2022, at 45% or so. Frankly I thought turnout would be much lower.
The Liberals
In addition to getting robbed in seat count (they finished second in something like 75 races?) they managed to avoid winning a single seat in all of Mississauga. Even Bonnie Crombie failed to win her seat. I am surprised at this; I thought the whole reason the provincial Liberals wanted Crombie (and the reason Doug Ford spent so much energy attacking her) was because she was a popular mayor in Mississauga. I guess not?
My answer is: good. I was not a fan of Crombie heading into the election, and nothing I saw during the campaign made me change that opinion. She was a classic case of campaigning on the left in order to govern from the right. During the leadership race, she was super tax-cutting fiscal conservative; during the election she kept emphasizing social causes like health care.
Local Races
Clancy won Kitchener Centre with 50% of the vote. It was a landslide. I am not sure why. Certainly, she was the only one who had good representation on lawn signs. Maybe progressives really wanted to avoid splitting the vote.
The big disappointment for me was Kitchener Conestoga. The vote splitting websites predicted that the Liberals were in second place in the riding, and they proved to be correct. The NDP (which I thought had more support in the riding) finished a distant third, but sure enough the sum of the NDP and Liberal votes in the riding would have surpassed the Conservative vote, so Mike Harris Jr gets to keep his seat. The other right-leaning parties in the riding did not make much of an impact. So much for Jim Karahalios being an organizing genius. (Also so much for me criticizing the strategic voting websites; they were right about Kitchener Conestoga and I was wrong.)
Waterloo went easily to Catherine Fife, which I think was deserved. She seemed tired during her Rogers debate. Some comments she made indicated she had a tough campaign.
As I expected, Kitchener South-Hespeler did not change. Neither did Cambridge, which was a disappointment but also not surprising. I guess Deutschmann is out of political office for a while.
Looking at the election map, Guelph, Waterloo and Kitchener Centre are lonely islands in a sea of blue.
It feels to me as if voters in Kitchener-Waterloo are willing to vote for local candidates over political parties. We saw this with Elizabeth Witmer and to a lesser extent Andrew Telegdi. My hope is that Aislinn Clancy will demonstrate her worth during the next election session, but we will see.