Memo To Del Duca And The OLP: Don't Go Limp

How The OLP Can Win

“I love you/But I’m afraid to love you”

My first ever provincial vote was not cast for the Ontario Liberals, but despite that fact, I spent a decent amount time in and around the party in the late stages of the Wynne Government. I was there at two fundraising dinners in Ottawa, I was in Scarborough for the last week of the Scarborough Rouge River byelection, and I was at the victory party for the Ottawa Vanier byelection, where Kathleen Wynne took the stage in a stunning confident mood despite copping a huge swing against her government in not one, but two seats that night. I’ve been in the same room as the now-former Premier a half dozen times, I’d say, and I once had a delightful conversation with her predecessor about Ottawa high schools. None of this makes me in any way impressive, I was just a University student in Ottawa with ties to the local Liberal club – and all of this is just to say, I know this party pretty well.

I bring this up as we approach the June election because the question of the election is in many ways about the unknown of Steven Del Duca, as opposed to the known, and not very well liked, figures of Doug Ford and Andrea Horwath. Plainly, the election is in the Liberals’ hands, and if they run a good campaign, they’ll win. And if they don’t, they’ll probably stay in third, and risk staying there. And I have no idea if they’ll pull it off or not.

That’s not actually true – gun to my head, I think they do, which is why I tweeted that I think Del Duca will be our Premier when the clock strikes January 1st, 2023, but I’m not confident in that. Ford could keep his majority, or Liberal gains could cost Ford the majority, and deliver an NDP Premier with Liberal votes, in an inversion of the 1985 deal. I don’t know the answer, but I do know one thing – all of this is within the Liberals’ control.

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“I love you/But I’m afraid to love you” is Jeff Buckley, and it is a haunting beautiful line. It is, also, the best description of the Liberal Party at its worst, both federally and in Ontario. Ignatieff’s Liberal Party was timid, scared, and afraid to stand for anything, and got washed away for it. He was against continued corporate tax cuts, against buying new fighter jets, and something else, I think, because I’m pretty sure he had three things in his stump speech. (Ed. Notes: It was jails, as a nod to Harper using Mandatory Minimums to be tough on crime.) What’s missing from that? Any overriding vision. He wanted an extra billion dollars a year for education, which I vaguely remember being about access to higher education, and beyond that, it was nothingness. Ignatieff was against jails and mandatory minimums, but Mark Holland denied the party would seek to repeal any Harper era crime laws. Ignatieff thought the F-35s were a boondoggle, but proposed no answer to what he would do instead, beyond a derisory promise to do it for less money. You can see where this is going.

Trudeau, for whatever you think of his Government or his ethics record, showed up with a singularly liberal and Liberal vision for Canada in 2015 and went from third to majority government. Did I love every aspect of the plan? Of course not, but it was an agenda, and like it or not, it was a vision. Trudeau wasn’t worried about being seen to be too left wing, he had a vision and he fought for it, against a hostile incumbent and an insulting condescending NDP leader who didn’t take the new kid on the block seriously. You seeing the parallels here, or do I need to be more explicit about it?

Andrea Horwath is a joke, and her bullshit answer last year on how the Charter rights of teachers and other public servants to be unvaccinated came before the health of the population made me embarrassed to have voted for a party led by her. In her 13th year leading the Ontario NDP, she still has no overarching vision for the province, or an answer as to why to vote for her that isn’t “the other two suck”, and that level of incompetence needs to be challenged. I voted NDP last time because they had the best chance of beating Ford in my riding, and that fact justifies the vote. It does not make the fact that this party has been ineffectual on good days and actively horrible on their bad ones go down any easier.

I don’t have to sing an aria on why I don’t want to see Ford go back into power, nor would it do anyone any good to hear the litany of failures repeated. Liberals and progressives need to be reminded that no matter how bad we feel he has been, he could very easily be returned in majority, and maybe even a comfortable one. We have no reason to think he has lost that majority for sure, and as infuriated as that might make me as an Ontario voter, it’s the truth. The thing is, Horwath and Ford are almost bit players in this story, because the story of this election will be about the Liberals.

Writing history is always a choice about what goes first. In telling the story of, say, Pierre Trudeau’s history, do you lead off the section on the FLQ Crisis with the otherwise unprecedented in peacetime infringements on civil liberties, or do you talk about the firm way Trudeau refused to bow to terrorism? Do you start the telling of the Mulroney Ministries with the Constitutional failures or the Free Trade deal with the US? It’s all choices, and it’s the same way with elections. Almost always, the story is written about the incumbents, why they either won or lost, what decisions they made that either guaranteed their reelection or doomed their futures. Here, it’s not about Ford, but about the mild-mannered leader of the third party.

If Del Duca wants it, the election is his for the taking, and it all starts and ends with the same thing – whether he is willing to let Ontario love him. If Del Duca takes a middle path and offers a prospectus for Government designed to neither offend or excite, he will languish in 3rd place, and deserve every second of it. A full throated offer to the province will alienate some, but it will excite many more – and in a race where 10% of the electorate is just waiting for the polls to break, that’s the right side of the trade.

Liberals are often terrified of being bold, despite the fact that bold offers are what get Liberal governments elected from opposition. Chretien won in 1993 with the Red Book, Trudeau won in 2015 with an unabashedly specific and credible platform for left wing government, and even Dalton McGuinty went into the 2003 election calling for electoral reform and a $1.15 bump in the minimum wage (amongst others). We know that Liberals win from opposition when they are bold, and yet, I am fucking terrified they won’t do it.

A specific, credible platform of change will see the Liberals get ahead of the NDP and ride the wave of anti-Ford left wingers who care most about beating the right to a Hung Legislature and a minority Liberal government, if not more. Timidity will end in failure, as the small target campaigns of McGuinty 1999, Ignatieff, and (although not a Liberal) Mulcair show. If the Liberals give into the fear they feel, they will be burned for it, and condemn this province to either an incompetently dangerous right wing government or a maliciously useless NDP one. The Ontario Liberals need to focus on what they’re feeling, and less about the fear that feeling instills. Do that, and Del Duca will be Premier. Let the fear get in the way, and we will all feel the consequences.

Don’t fuck this up.