Memo To The Ontario Opposition: "Ford Sucks" Isn't Enough

On Why The Ontario Left Is Stuck

The last week has seen three notable events in Ontario politics - the election of Bonnie Crombie as Liberal Leader, the Greens gaining the Kitchener Centre byelection, and an Abacus Data poll showing the PCs back around 40% of the vote. For all the teeth gnashing of the last year - which I’ve added to considerably, I’m aware - the Ford PCs are basically in the same place they were on voting day 2022. They’ve recovered from the depths of the Greenbelt scandal, the NDP and Liberals have spent the fall fighting each other and not the government, and the Greens have embarrassed the NDP by cleaning their clocks in Kitchener. But for all that activity, nothing has really mattered, clearly.

This is either a sign of Doug Ford’s Teflon status that will drive some crazy, a sign that voters are morons, or evidence that the opposition isn’t doing a good enough job. Given that the Ford government did tank in the polls when the Greenbelt scandal erupted first, I don’t think it’s that they’re Teflon, and it’s frankly nonsense to dismiss the voters. So we get to a point where we have to ask why the Opposition can’t find any cut through, and it’s as depressing as it is understandable.

The Ford government is a fairly easy government to oppose, in the literal sense of Opposition. They do a lot of bad and evil things that have very obvious consequences, and they tend to do things in shady and corrupt ways. But they also tend to highly visible popular things (and take a lot of credit for them). It’s a government that creates a lot of opportunity to expose things about them, and the NDP have been fairly good at exposing them.

What won the Federal Liberals the 2015 election wasn’t the idea that Harper was bad, it was that they had a plan to make things better. Between the CCB, electoral reform, Indigenous reconciliation, weed, and some deficit spending to fix the mediocre economy, the Liberals had a plan. They weren’t an Opposition marching to the beat of the Government, they were an alternative creating the political weather.

My advice to both Crombie and Stiles? If you want to win the war, find a message, and fucking run with it.

…

If you believe that Abacus poll, when asked about a Liberal Party led by Crombie, the Liberals break 30% and would break the current stalemate between the two leading progressive parties, but hypothetical polling is almost impossible. (The classic example was the UK in 2019 - when asked how they’d vote in an election if the UK hadn’t left the EU by October 31st, the polls had the Tories around 20% and the Brexit Party roughly equal with them. The December election, which took place with the UK still in the EU, saw the Tories hit 45%.)

How Crombie comes out of the gates, and how she is covered, in the next weeks and months will determine whether the 7% of voters who said they’d vote NDP or PC on the initial vote intention question but said they’d vote for a Crombie led OLP stick around. It’s also worth noting that the OLP under Del Duca routinely polled above 30% and they got 24% on the day. (This is not a prediction of failure for Crombie, just a reminder that things can move a lot, and fast.)

Crombie does have decisions to make - how she responds to the double barreled attacks coming out at her is going to be important. The NDP are calling her a conservative NIMBY who is attempting to con people by claiming to be a progressive when she’s not, and the PCs are attacking her for being too left wing (and also a NIMBY). Her line to describe herself seems to be congealing onto “pragmatic progressive”, which is fine in a vacuum but it’s far too early to say whether it’ll work. That the Liberals elected someone who said she wanted to govern from right of centre and called John Tory a political hero and is now claiming any level of status as a progressive is, of course, their cross to bear.

The NDP have questions to answer, too, namely what have they been doing for the last year. Where’s the NDP’s plan to keep struggling ERs open or reduce class sizes? Where’s their ideas for how to fix the housing crisis? How the fuck are the Greens the one to introduce a Private Member’s Bill to make 4 stories legal by right? What the fuck have you been doing with the advantages of Official Opposition?

The answer is that they’ve been focused on opposition, and not making an active case for their own election. In that sense, they’ve done fine - they’ve exposed a lot of good things that I’m glad I now know, but stepping back, it’s a bit penny wise and pound foolish. In trying to be tactically wise, they’ve abandoned the entire concept of an overarching strategy. The press release they put out after losing Kitchener was laughable, and it’s a worrying sign that nobody could see that the result in Kitchener deserved a solemn “we’re listening and will do better” response, and not denialist spin.

None of these issues are necessarily fatal - Bonnie has a solid base of policy she can work to make into party policy, both hers and Nate’s, and the NDP have a party apparatus that should be able to put together a vision. But it’s not surprising that the PCs are still ahead when the Official Opposition refuse to step on the field as anything other than critics of the incumbents and the Liberals have been focused on their own internal strife. The Liberals at least have an excuse for why they haven’t been out there making the case for themselves, but until someone starts to make the positive case for progressive politics in this province we shouldn’t be fucking surprised it doesn’t move the needle.

The discourse around the ONDP keeps talking about them as facing difficulties right now, but their biggest difficulty is much more structural than their moronic candidate selection failure of Sarah Jama and the consequences. They don’t have an identity. Skimming through their 2022 platform, it’s a bunch of good aspirations that either don't have the follow through needed to enact or are punted into the long grass with inquiries or reviews and buzzwords like “reform” that don’t actually tell you what they’d fix.

We have ER waiting lists that are literally killing people. We don't have the doctors and nurses we’d need to staff the hospitals even if we had the building space, which we don’t. The elementary school I went to growing up now has a series of portable classrooms littering the playground, with class sizes too big to keep up with the constraints of the building. We don’t fund post secondary in this province, which means that the colleges and universities bring in hundreds of thousands of new foreign students to stay solvent, which exacerbates the housing crisis. We have a Premier who nearly let developers pick their preferred land swaps to maximize their profits. Oh, and Ottawa spent weeks with wildfire smoke so bad it was unhealthy to be outside for prolonged periods this summer. Neither opposition party right now is anywhere close to meeting the moment.

The Liberals get a pass because they needed to pick their leader, but as 2024 starts, the centre and left in Ontario is going to need to get off their asses and stop viewing “Doug Ford is bad” as a sufficient argument. Whether you like it or not, Ontario does not hear “Doug Ford is bad” and immediately say the words “and the alternatives would be better.” I think that, and most of the readers of this site do, but we are not exactly representative.

Both the OLP and the ONDP have an opportunity to make the active case for change instead of merely focusing on the fact Ford suck. Ontarians know that. They’re not convinced you’d be any better.

Time to prove them wrong.