Ford, Del Duca, And Something Worth Fighting For

On THe Real Fight In Ontario

I’ve always had a soft spot for Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head, a beautiful song whose ending has always made me tear up. Last night, I ended up going out for a walk, and in the process I started to work through some of the Ontario information nagging at me – about my model, my writing, my prediction, everything and nothing. And then I heard the song change, and I heard the song in a new light.

“He said, I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war/If you can tell me something worth fighting for”

…

Nobody reading this article will be surprised to find out the deep and unending contempt I hold Doug Ford in is still deep and unending, but I do think some people will be surprised to find that I can both that contempt and think he’s pretty close to being re-elected in majority this summer. I don’t want it to happen but a whole lot of people are letting wishes by the author of the thought, and letting that hope that Ontario will never make this mistake again get in the way of accepting reality, which in this case is that he could genuinely win again.

My latest projection has the Ford Government at 58 seats, 5 short of a majority government, and 18 seats down on the last election. If you want to be charitable to the PCs, 5 seats isn’t much at all, and it could easily be gotten back. If you want to be less charitable to their chances, I still have them winning Del Duca’s seat because I’m making no leadership boost for the Liberals, they’re winning their 3 main NDP targets (Essex, Niagara Centre, and Oshawa) already, and they’re scraping by in seats in Kitchener and Scarborough with derisory vote shares because of left wing vote splits, which if the two parties split the vote in a less PCPO-friendly way will be another flood of seats flipping Orange or Red. Either way, the PCs are in trouble.

There’s clearly a willingness to fight this Ford government, even from usually non-partisan and apolitical types, but now they’re in the fight, either because of mistreatment of kids with autism, the failures on COVID, the way this government has fucked over nurses, or all of the above, but for it to work electorally one of the other parties has to make a compelling pitch to the electorate. I’ve written before that Steven Del Duca needs to offer a compelling, bold pitch to the electorate, and I stand by that completely. But what he actually needs to do is offer a vision of Ontario worth fighting for.

For those who will take the language of my metaphor too far, I do not actually mean there is a legion of Ontario voters willing or eager to buy a gun or start a war, but there are a whole hell of a lot of them willing and eager to get rid of this running sore of a government and replace it with something better than this has been. If the Liberals want to go from third to first as they did federally, they’ll have to do it by giving the angry and motivated something to actually rally behind, and while that’s not really possible as the pressure is rightly on Ford and the school reopening on Monday, the Liberals will need something, and soon.

The biggest fear I have as an anti-Ford progressive is that the parties of the left will focus on the failures (many as they are) of the Ford era and not actually run a good campaign against him. It happened with Harper in 2011 – the left took his unsuitability for the job as an accepted reality and spent the whole campaign arguing about stupid shit and fighting each other, all the while Harper got his majority government. The 2018 election saw much of the same, especially towards the end as the Liberals tried to save their own skin and the NDP had no message for soft Conservatives except “Ford Bad”, which unsurprisingly didn’t work. This time, this can’t happen.

Ford’s basically been at 35% for the last six months, and the only thing that’s really moved is the Liberals and NDP have been fighting each other. If the majority who are not Ford supporters can rally the flag behind one option, as IRG has them doing, the Tories are dead. If neither Liberals nor New Democrats give them anything worth rallying for, then the Tories have a good chance at winning this.

I’m not bothering to suggest the NDP should do this because it is as clear to me as anything has ever been that the NDP cannot lead anything more than a coalition of the “fuck it, I guess I have to”, and that’s not going to be enough here – as it wasn’t in 2018. The only real chance anti-Ford Ontarians have is the Liberals, and as terrifying as that sentence can be for those who have not always loved Liberal governments in Ontario, it’s true.

Ontario’s only hope at this election is if Steven Del Duca and the Liberals give this province an alternative, and an agenda, worth fighting for. If he doesn’t, we will all be worse off for it.