Ontario: What If Your World Should Fall Apart?

On Crises And Elections

If the last four years since the election of Doug Ford has taught us anything, the lesson’s been simple – there is no governing to the platform you were elected to implement, only governing according to the circumstances of the moment. Since Ford’s gotten elected, there’s been a Global pandemic, the US, UK, and Australia have all changed Prime Ministers, Russia’s further invaded Ukraine, Justin Trudeau has won two more elections, and the entire federal Tory Party has been both very-anti blockade and very pro-occupation. In other words, a lot of shit’s changed.

The reason this matters, beyond the constant reminder that the platforms and promises of all three parties this election season are entirely conditional on shit not getting wonkier, is that elections aren’t about policies, they’re about leadership. We’re electing politicians to lead for us – we aren’t a direct democracy and there isn’t a mechanism to overrule the judgement of the people we elect on an issue by issue basis. Elections in this country are plainly elections of judgement, and that’s what you’re voting for – people whose judgement can be trusted at a time of crisis. That is, at the end of the day, what you’re voting for.

Yes, campaigns get reported as being about the issues of the day and the platforms and the ideas, but at the end of the day they’re about electing leaders with a worldview – most people don’t know the laundry list of items a party is proposing before every election, and those who do are mostly hardcore partisans anyways. They are electing people to do a serious job, and making assumptions about whether the leader, and their team, is qualified.

There’s a reason Doug Ford spent the last 10 days of the Ontario campaign blanketed by Christine Elliott, who has served as the “don’t worry, he won’t get too extreme” security blanket for Ford since she agreed to run for the Legislature again after losing to Ford for the PCPO leadership race. In the final debate of the campaign, Ford spent every second he could attacking Andrea Horwath for the crime of having an incompetent set of candidates and not having any party members who would be ready to do a serious job. Stephen Harper tried to do a similar thing to Justin Trudeau, but his willingness to highlight Andrew Leslie and Chrystia Freeland helped make sure he wasn’t seen as a lightweight. The fact the Ontario NDP last time didn’t have a better answer is just another reason their party is more useless than tits on a bull.

The reason this matters is we’re about to have an election where the province is stuck between the desire for a return to normalcy and the horrors of the past two years, and the only thing I keep thinking as I think of what the ballot question will, or at least, should be, is simple: What If Your World Should Fall Apart?

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Only Love Can Break Your Heart/Try To Be Sure Right From The Start/Yes Only Love Can Break Your Heart/What If Your World Should Fall Apart?

It’s worth thinking about the totality of that line, stolen from Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart, because at some point it becomes something more than just a song about love. Young’s words are notionally about love, about romance, but they work on another level – the level at which you need to be before you cast your vote.

Young’s point, for what it’s true – it’s only those you truly love who have the power to break your heart, because if you were merely indifferent to someone, their rejection or their betrayal would never hurt that much. It’s a riff I’m used before on this site, and it’s one that means a lot to me personally, but it’s also true here. Doug Ford won an election and then had to be an entirely different Premier than the one he ran to be. Far from getting to ride decent economic growth to prosperity while fighting with unions about pay raises, he had to become a Pandemic Premier, making life-or-death calls on the very nature of education and health in this province. It’s not what anyone ever could have expected, and it’s why this matters so much.

I generally find these sorts of hypotheticals to be valueless, but do we really think that if we knew then what we know now that Doug fucking Ford would have won either the 2018 PCPO leadership race or the 2018 election? I certainly don’t, but we didn’t know and he did. It’s not to say he is in some way an illegitimate Premier – he’s decidedly not – but I just highly doubt that if pandemic management was the issue de jour Ontarians would have been as willing to vote for the brother of the Crack Mayor, whose tenure at City Hall was, to be technical, a clusterfuck on a daily basis.

Crisis management is not what people expected to be electing, but functionally, the defining story of this Ford term will be school closures, vax mandates, Long Term Care deaths and the consequences of all three. How many people can remember what we were all outraged with Ford about in 2019? Anyone, except Mike Moffatt and those parents rightly livid about the disastrous changes to support for kids with autism? Bueller? Of course not, it’s all this fight, and this crisis, because it has eaten everything else.

If the Liberals want to win the next election – which, I can’t fucking opine on whether they will or not because nobody’s released a fucking Ontario poll for a month – then they need to make this the ballot question. They need to offer a vision for Ontario, contrast it against Ford, but also emphasize their competence and their nimbleness in a crisis. The LCBO Russian booze ban is actually, for as silly as it sounds, the kind of thing to build on – it shows the Liberals can be fleet of foot and reactive quickly in a crisis, and they need more of that.

If the election becomes about tax plans, the Tories have a chance to win it. If the election becomes about how Ford has handled the last crisis, the Tories will easily win it. But if the Liberals frame the election around the next four years, and who is best able to build from here while also being prepared for a future crisis – then they’re going to find their message.

The Liberals need to spend the next 3 months articulating a vision, and part of that vision needs to be why they can be trusted in a moment of crisis. If they either can’t or won’t do that, they’ll be making the same mistake that cost the Ontario NDP last time, and will be setting this province up for another government it can’t afford. And, frankly, it won’t break my heart – my affection for the Ontario Liberals being non-existent, even if I’m going to vote for them – but it will break the hearts of so many who truly want and need a non-Tory government, so try and be sure right from the start.