Ontario: Please God, Calm Down

Also, Thoughts On 2018 And 2022

Why did I get the 2021 Canadian election so right, when so many – including esteemed Chucklefucks at national news magazines who really don’t know what they’re doing – when every liberal and Liberal in this country lost their fucking minds, and so many analysts bought the bad polling?

It’s simple, really – they thought they knew the ending before it was written, because they got caught up in the moment and they thought they saw a path from where we were to where the results would end up being. Or, put another way, we can blame it all on a rush of blood to the head, as it were.

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Any meaningful conversation about the 2022 Ontario election needs to start where the 2018 one ended, with the way the PCs had a good-not-great night. Compared to the pre-election polls, the PCs won more seats than they would have otherwise. Compared to the vast majority of polls after Ford became leader, they underperformed – barely breaking 40% of the vote while the vast majority of the pre-writ polls had them in the mid 40s. Their vote declined in the first half of the campaign – a lot, actually – as Ford had to face public scrutiny, but in the last 10 days, it rose as soft Liberals got scared of the idea of an NDP government of lunatics nobody’s ever heard of.

Yes, plenty of Wynne 2014 voters voted PC in 2018, and denying that is useless. There were plenty of places where the Liberals lost voters on their right flank because the Tories were promising fiscal conservatism and tax stringency and they were terrified the NDP would tax them to oblivion. This is an undeniable fact.

What is also a fact is that Doug Ford did his damndest to lose the 2018 election, and had to win it by running not on his own brand, but as the PC Team, with Christine Elliott and Carolyn Mulroney his chief guarantors. Elliott has retired and Mulroney’s time as Justice Minister was such an unqualified cockup that she has lost all public visibility, and so Ford enters the next election without the team he sold us would help him.

Why did the suburbs trust Ford and not trust Andrea Horwath? Simple – nobody, including me, had the fucking faintest idea who would make up an NDP cabinet. We all find Stephen Lecce to be an incompetent beyond all redemption, but the fact is, nobody knew anything about who would be the NDP’s Finance Minister, Health Minister, or Education Minister had they won, and the electorate decided they weren’t in the mood for a massive fucking gamble. I mean, I voted NDP anyways, but it’s not hard to see why people weren’t willing to trust them.

Now? The Liberal brand is less scary, which for good or for ill matters, and the uselessness of the last two Liberal campaigns in Ontario is gone. You want to know why I treat The Herle Burly and Curse of Politics dismissively? David Herle isn’t good at his job. In 2014, the Ontario Liberals showed up and won a campaign because the Ontario PCs completely self-imploded, and then Herle’s strategic brilliance saw the Liberals get smashed in 2018.

Five of the worst 6 Liberal campaigns (federally or Ontario) since Chretien have been because the party has had nothing to sell, and four of those six were Herle co-productions. Martin blew a huge lead in 2004 and then lost government in 2006, and Wynne won in 2014 because Hudak ran the worst campaign of the millennium, and then in 2018, the Liberals re-ran 2014 and got smashed. Not having that centrist uselessness running the campaign has to help.

Throw in the fact that Del Duca’s team seems to have a handle on how to do this, with two big announcements in recent weeks (the child care rebate and the suite of Economic Dignity measures Saturday), and the Liberals seem to know what they’re doing. Why bother releasing it all now, when the housing and environmental planks will (if the measures so far are indicative) be bold, especially if there’s more direct benefits? Space it out, we have time.

If an election were held today, Doug Ford would get 63 seats, per my model. That is the exact number he needs to win a majority government. Now, is an election today? No. Is it tomorrow? No. Then calm the fuck down. When I’m stressed, I’ll tell you, and right now, I’m confident that the Liberals will hold off Ford. And honestly, y’all need to calm the fuck down.

What’s likely from here is Ford will tout the benefits of the child care deal, introduce a budget with a fancy tax cut for the middle class in it, and walk into the writ period with 40% of the vote, and then the campaign will start. The Liberals will be given equal airtime, Del Duca will be treated as an equal participant in the coverage, and the Liberals will get their message out, pushing the economic dignity stuff and their housing offer to the cities, pushing the child care rebate to the suburbs, and pushing Ford’s legacy of failures everywhere.

Once in a campaign, Ford will have to answer tough media questions, which he skillfully avoids now by never doing any interviews, and he will have the same problem he skillfully exploited in 2022 – who can Ontarians trust to do the big jobs, since Lecce is about as popular as drinking piss and Elliott is gone?

At some point, liberals in this country need to take a Xanax and fucking relax. Not everything is a crisis, and freaking out like it is one and then blaming it on a rush of blood to the head isn’t healthy for you and it’s entirely taxing for me, since I don’t get paid to be your therapists when you freak out – and you always freak out.

“Meet me on the road/Meet me where I said/Blame it all upon/A rush of blood to the head” is one of my favourite lines ever, but the thing about that line is that it conveys a specific meaning – a specific instance, a fight forgotten, a feud left behind. For Ontarians looking to replace Ford, these fights are neverending, and everything is always a crisis requiring admonition and placation. It’s not.

Doug Ford would win an election today by the skin of his teeth. He is likely to lose in June. And every person reading this needs to stop freaking out and blaming it on a rush of blood to the head every damn day.