Ontario: Time To Panic? Maybe

Plus, Bonus Stephen Lecce Thoughts

The reason I didn’t write this column yesterday was simple – I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground once we got Leger, Mainstreet, and Abacus back to back to back Wednesday morning, and I didn’t really want to fake it.

I still don’t really know what I think, so this column is going to be less answering any questions as me working through some, so let’s just do this, and see what I end up with by the end of it.

Current State Of The Polls

An election held right now would see the PCs win a majority government. Leger, Mainstreet, and IRG this week all show blowouts, double digit leads for the PCs that would result in the PCs flirting with 75 or 80 seats, in all reality.

Nanos and EKOS show results that would result in the PCs in the low 50s in terms of seats and see Steven Del Duca comfortably become Premier after some wrangling on the floor, ala Higgs and Horgan.

Abacus is in the middle, with a result that would see the Tories right on the line for Majority government.

Who’s right? Well, if you put a gun to my head and ask me blind which set of pollsters I’d trust, I’d take Quito and Jean-Marc over Frank and Nik any day of the week, so almost definitionally I’m on team blowout right now, even if I don’t really get why they blew out. This isn’t the Canadian campaign, where the divergence was methods-based – in 2021, Abacus, Angus Reid, and Leger were the sane ones in August and EKOS and Mainstreet were the wild ones, a clear split on method. Here, it’s less than that, with Nanos (phone/online) and EKOS (phone) showing good results for the OLP, Abacus (online) showing mediocre but not crisis level ones, and Mainstreet (phone), Leger (online), and IRG (online) showing big leads.

You could squint and say the phone pollsters are better for the OLP if you ignore Wednesday and Thursday’s Mainstreet and focus on Tuesday’s numbers, but that would be, and this is a clinical term, fucking hackery, so it’s a bit hard to figure out. The other thing is, of course, we won’t get a sense for a few days of what’s happening, because all the pollsters we can expect weekly releases of all dropped on Wednesday, meaning all we’ll get for a bit is Mainstreet’s daily track. Maybe Mainstreet sways wildly, maybe it’s consistent, but we won’t have any way to check if their data is reliable or not – good for the OLP or bad – until the next round of Abacus and Leger (presumably next Wednesday).

Again, let’s be very clear – unless you take Frank Graves and Nik Nanos at gospel, which their records suggest would be the definition of a bold move, Doug Ford is currently in majority government territory. Unless Mainstreet really – and I do mean really – break hard for the Liberals in the next couple of days, they’ll likely remain there for a little bit.

Does This Mean Del Duca’s Done?

God no.

If anything should be taken from this, it’s the fact that campaigns matter. There’s been a pretty clear shift from the beginning of the campaign to now, and that’s because in a campaign period, people focus in ways they haven’t before. If the first week of the campaign was good for Ford – and, for what it’s worth, none of the non-Mainstreet pollsters have any samples from after the debate – then there’s no reason to write off the rest of the campaign as moving the polls the other way. And, when you have polls in two different universes – Nanos/EKOS and Mainstreet/Leger/IRG – it’s probably reasonable to throw just a little more uncertainty on the whole exercise. (Did I follow this rule in Canada? In fairness, no, but this election is a lot harder to properly peg.)

Do I still think Del Duca will end up Premier? Yes, because I frankly don’t really get how we’re getting a 13% lead in Leger, but it’s our best pollster, so I’m stuck accepting it as at least possible. Ford’s campaign has been remarkably low key, and I just didn’t think Ford’s week of not much happening would see him rise from the mid 30s to the high 30s. Clearly I was wrong at guessing the polls, but I don’t think that Ford is really on route to gain seats.

“Ford is currently in majority” is not “Ford will win a majority”, and I still subjectively think that he’ll fall back to earth – and I’m assuming the NDP vote will start crashing more to the benefit of the OLP – but yes, as of now, Ford’s in majority.

What About Your Confidence In Del Duca?

The thing about this site is I can either be honest, or I can hedge, and if you love my honesty when I’m confident that the thing you want is going to happen and you dislike it when I change my mind when the polls move, find a different favourite writer, I swear to God.

I was confident Tuesday Del Duca was in a good position, because based on the info at 4PM on Tuesday or whenever the fuck I wrote that column, he was in one. This isn’t, by the way, like Del Duca’s polls tanked because of some clear and obvious scandal – this isn’t Blackface, where I stopped writing columns until we had the post-Blackface data because we knew that there was some big thing coming down the track. As of Tuesday, I was confident I was right. And then Wednesday happened.

I might be confident (or arrogant, depending on your view of my work), but I’m not a fucking idiot, and “Leger has a 13% lead for Ford” is as clear and obvious whack to one’s supreme confidence as you can get. It has me much less confident in my views because it’s fucking Leger. Maybe they’re wrong, or maybe there’s movement back to the Liberals next week, or maybe Stephen Lecce’s frat antics is a bigger problem for the PCs than I’m thinking. I have no idea. But what I do know is that I don’t get to be as confident after Wednesday’s poll releases as I did before them.

Bonus Section – NDP, What The Fuck Are You Doing?

I don’t have a full column on this, but I have more than two tweets worth, so let’s talk about Lecce, Western University, fraternity culture, and a slave auction.

First off – slavery is and was bad, and I cannot believe I have to spell that out at the beginning of this. The notion of a slave auction is bad, I get it. Secondly, I think Lecce’s a world class wanker, an idiot beyond salvation, who has been a disaster as a Minister of Education and should be fired from cabinet in a just world.

That said, Lecce didn’t do anything that bad.

What those who are calling for his disendorsement are saying is that they don’t understand frat culture nor do they care to, which is their right, of course. But the thing is, if you want to know why the NDP are losing votes amongst men, and amongst men who watch Joe Rogan and think that political correctness can go too far? This shit, right here, this is why.

Lecce’s frat held a stupid premise to raise some money for a local children’s hospital. It’s a dumb event, sure, but he was an 18 year old pledge and then a 19 year old sophomore brother when he participated in this. It’s not like it was his idea and it’s not like there’s any evidence he was particularly up for it. It was part of his position in that frat to do the job. The notion that this should be disqualifying for public offence is so absurd as to barely merit discussion.

What opponents of the Slave Auction really dislike is the entire notion of fraternity life – the visceral, sometimes shitty, deeply elitist way that frats work is certainly lamentable, if you’re minded to oppose them. It’s a place where the worst impulses of horny young men can go, and in bad hands you can certainly see them be forces for bad, especially around the treatment of women and the epidemic of unreported sexual assaults on campus. None of this is to say that there aren’t real downsides to frat life, and I say this as someone who never pledged one and frankly doesn’t mind that I didn’t.

What I also know is that if your objection is to frat life, then have that argument, don’t get into a fucking cul-de-sac of blaming one kid for the mistakes of a legacy institution. If you want to oppose the jocular, insular, potentially corrupting nature of Greek Life, then fucking do so – and do so for sororities and fraternities, because anyone suggesting that sororities aren’t bad but frats are is full of shit – but don’t get on a fucking kid for mistakes made way above his pay grade.

Yes, it’s fair for keen followers of the Scrimshaw Universe to note that I set large parts of Salvation In The Storm in a fraternity setting, but to say I did so out of any affection for frat life, and not because I needed a plot device to give my characters reasons to be in the same places at the same time, would be untrue. Lecce did the slave auction because that’s what that particular fraternity expects from their underclassmen, clearly – or, at least, expected at the time. He just happened to be in the Venn Diagram of “old enough that the slave auction still happened” and “young enough there’s documentation”, which is basically the story of millennial politicians.

Oh, and for all the sanctimony on the left, Justin Trudeau wore Blackface when he was, what, 28, 29, and the NDP have actively propped up his government for the last three years, and will do so again for the next 3 and change. When it’s Lecce, his mistake – as a fucking teenager – is forever disqualifying. When it’s Trudeau, for a sin much worse, at a much older age, it’s forgiven and forgotten. Hypocrisy at its finest.

If the left is to truly claim to be about second chances and making amends for past mistakes and all that fucking language they use when they talk about drug users and former inmates and all that, then they should probably find it within themselves to not have a fucking meltdown over Lecce being a member in good standing in a frat at Ontario’s biggest party school. Got any former Queens grads in your caucus or your candidates list, NDP? If you do, they probably got into some shit at some point, knowing that crowd.

Do I love defending Stephen Lecce? No, he’s a nonce, I hate him. But my God, use his horrible tenure as Education Minister against him, not that he used to be in a fucking frat.