Ontario: Where The Liberals And NDP Go From Here

Thoughts On Rebuilding

“Checo is a legend.”

It’s been overshadowed by the way the race ended, but the final race of the 2021 F1 season was actually setting up to be a legendary, never to be forgotten race even before the controversies at the end. Between the Redbull of Max Verstappen getting pole, him losing first place going into Turn 1 to Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton, and then Max forcing Lewis off the track (which definitely helped Lewis gain his lead back), it was a barnburner of a race.

I watched it for the first time yesterday, bored as I was during the day waiting for Ontario to come in, and there’s a moment maybe 20 laps into the race that stuck with me last night as I was trying to sleep. About 20 laps in, Verstappen and Hamilton had both pitted for new tires, and Lewis was about 8 seconds ahead of the Dutchman, but Lewis was nominally in 2nd – simply because the other Red Bull, driven by Sergio “Checo” Perez, hadn’t gone in for a pitstop. On his older tires, Perez was a sitting duck, and Lewis was just going to pass him and keep driving, before Perez hopped into the pits for new tires himself and focused on getting third place.

Except, Perez held Lewis up – not just for a bit, but twice, catching Hamilton after Lewis passed him once, and completely fucked with Lewis’ race. Remember that 8 second gap? By the time Lewis passed Sergio for good, it was 1.3 seconds, and Perez would then bow out, let Max pass him, and then the battle was on. Perez gained nothing out of this – he was in third either way, with a huge gap behind him such that none of this mattered to his race - but he helped his teammate win, and got the appropriate love from Verstappen, who went from driving in no man’s land to being right on Lewis’ tail all while Checo was holding up Lewis.

It wasn’t a wholly selfless act – Checo earned the gratitude and love of the entire Red Bull team that day, and his success helping Max to a World Championship is probably a decent amount why his contract was renewed this week to be Red Bull’s second driver – but it certainly was an act where the upside for him was ephemeral and all theoretical, whereas the benefit for Max was clear and immediate. And the more I think about last night’s Ontario results, I’m starting to wonder who the left’s Checo Perez will end up being, because holy shit we need one.

…

So, the NDP had a good-not-great night – losing Windsor Tecumseh, the Thunder Bay seat they held before (but gained the Liberal held one), Timmins, and Essex and all their Brampton seats to the PCs and losing Kingston and Beaches-East York to the Liberals is the bad news, holding Niagara Centre, Oshawa, Toronto St. Pauls, and Ottawa Centre some of the good – but one that’s hard to discern a pattern from. If you had told me the NDP win Ottawa Centre and Toronto St. Pauls handily – overwhelmingly – I’d have assumed they were a lock to hold Beaches. When they lost Windsor Tecumseh, I assumed they were locks to lose Niagara Centre and Oshawa. I have no idea how some of these results didn’t happen on the same night.

The answer could be twofold – Oshawa and Niagara Centre are changing a bit, as they become two of the remaining places where people can find a home in the extended definition of the 905, so they could be more prime left wing targets, but I don’t really buy that. What I suspect happened is given turnout was down 15% (from 58% to 43%), the power of the NDP’s base and union-powered GOTV was elevated, as the marginal voters who didn’t turn out but might have if turnout was higher were more Tory friendly right trending voters.

On Beaches, I have no good answer but I’m less surprised by idiosyncratic results there and in St. Pauls, because downtown hipster ridings will do contrarian and localized things. I didn’t have a great handle on the Lib/NDP downtown fights the whole campaign, that’s why I completely ignored them, and it’s why I’m not too shocked. In Brampton, only one of those results was shocking to the model, and it wasn’t even that shocking. It’s what happens when the NDP narrowly win 2 seats and comfortably win the other and then their vote goes down 10%.

What I do know is the NDP aren’t getting back both sides of this coin – they can be the party for Beaches and Kingston, for University graduates and those looking to join it, or they can be the party for Timmins, Windsor, and Essex, for their working class roots, but they can’t be both. Andrea Horwath has handed the party not only a leadership election but an identity crisis, because they have to choose between the path that a lot of the NDP voters want – progressives in urban centres and university campuses want the NDP to be something like their Federal cousins, and the old union workforce fucking hates those progressives.

Is the NDP going to be the party of people who think Netflix is bad for platforming transphobic comedy specials from Chapelle and Gervais, or is it a party for people who think that the left are snowflakes for telling them they can’t make jokes about some people because of cancel culture? Are they going to be a party for preening leftists who shop at Toronto’s first “anti-capitalist” coffee shop (which is very capitalist but has some left wing books) or is it for workers rights, including the unvaccinated’s right to work in schools and hospitals? Is it about firmly believing in left wing cultural stances and accepting a broad array of people on how far the redistributive economics should go, or is it about firmly believing in the redistributive economics and allowing for a wide array of cultural beliefs?

I don’t have an answer for them – there’s no “right” answer here. Each has upsides and downsides, but this is the NDP’s looming choice – and they should understand their future on these terms.

The Liberals, on the other hand? I’m gonna be honest – I led with the NDP mostly because I have a handle on the depth and breadth of their problems and questions coming out of last time. That one is easy to diagnose where they go from here, or at least where the internal arguments and struggles will be. Here, the Liberals? It’s so much harder because they’re so much more fucked.

The Liberals will go into the new Legislature with another leadership void, another crisis of confidence, and an electoral map that is more devoid of prospects that the last one. The thing about getting 19.6% of the vote, as they did in 2018, is that your floor is so low that there’s way more room to grow. The thing is, the Liberals just got another 4% of the vote and gained 1 net seat – and didn’t win anything in Peel, Halton, Etobicoke, or “downtown” (as I have been told off for calling Beaches a “downtown” seat).

Let’s have some fun with this – the Liberals have no seat west of Yonge Street in Toronto. Of their 8 seats, 3 of them are in Ottawa, they won Kingston, and then it’s four eastern Toronto seats – Beaches, two Don Valleys, and the one Scarborough. Once you pass Yonge Street on the 401, the party is dead, and like, I don’t even know what to think. They’re in second place and within 10% in 15 Conservative held seats, it looks like – which isn’t enough to cost the PCs majority government, and it’s also not enough to get the Liberals back into 2nd, so I don’t have any idea what their next move is. Like, this is existential crisis shit for the OLP.

The problem is, there’s no left government after 2026 without depriving the Tories of a lot of suburban seats they already hold, and the NDP are absolutely nowhere in Mississauga and Halton, so they need a Liberal revival to have any chance of winning necessary, important seats. Those Dippers cheering on the demise of the Liberals are getting short termist joy out of a long term hollowing out of the viable suburban left wing force, and a permanently weakened Liberal Party will only help the Tories.

The problem with all of this discourse is that there’s a selfishness to all of it – to the Liberals parachuting their proposed Cabinet members into NDP held seats to the NDP focusing on protecting their left flank to the way Dippers are finding silver linings in this disaster of a result. Let’s be very, very clear – support who you want, be happy about what you want, all of it, but this is an overall bad night for everyone on the left, and tribalism is convincing some it wasn’t so bad.

The left needs someone to step up and be the Checo of this fight, because at the end of the day, the right way of looking at the Liberals and NDP are as two drivers driving two cars for the same team. The Liberals and NDP aren’t Max and Lewis, they’re Max and Checo (or Lewis and Valtteri, if you want to talk about Sochi). Yes, they’re fighting between themselves, but at the end of the day, the common goal made Checo not just obey an order to help Max, but actively ask what the plan was because he knew his job.

A disunited left going into the next election like this is a huge risk, despite the fact that the Liberals won in 2015 in similar disunity. Fuck around and risk it, and maybe this works – or maybe it very very very doesn’t. You want to run that risk again? I fucking don’t.

It’s likely this fight will see people in three camps – the “we don’t need a deal” Liberals who point to 2015, the “joint cooperation, but no merger” Nathan Cullen/Joyce Murray position people, and the merger supporters – and it will be the defining conversation amongst many.

The merger is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory – these two parties got 47.5% of the vote when all the counts are in, and therefore if you add them together, you get a total more than Ford. Especially given Ford won some seats with vote shares sub-40%, this idea will be very attractive to some people. The problem is, it just won’t work as smoothly.

If the merger happened, plenty of David Herle types would oppose the party, and could genuinely vote for the Conservatives if they think the new party is just a NDP takeover of their Liberal loves. If the Liberals are deemed to be eating the NDP, then the Greens go to 15% of the vote as the NDP’s left flank doesn’t trust the new party and looks for a “non-neoliberal” option (despite not having a fucking clue what neoliberal means in a Canadian context). Remember, the combined Canadian Alliance and PC vote shares in 2000 federally were 37.7%. Harper’s united Conservative Party in 2004? 29.6%. The notion you can just add vote shares and go is for the birds.

For the “no cooperation” people, the challenge is simple – who the fuck is the Justin Trudeau of this Ontario Liberal movement that’s coming to save the party despite no deal? I thought the left would consolidate around Del Duca out of a lack of better options, and that was wrong, which means that anyone who wants to risk that strategy has to tell us who the dynamite option to win despite the split left is. Frankly, they don’t exist.

I am here for left cooperation, but I am also here for ideas that will work, and I don’t think a merger will. It feels like an easy solution to a difficult problem, and those are generally very bad. But, at the end of the day, something has to happen, someone has to find their way to some form of cooperation or deal or something, someone has to take a risk.

Max’s radio call back to his race engineer called Checo a legend for stepping up when Red Bull, and Max, needed it most. The Ontario left needs their Checo, and they need it soon.