The OLP Needs To Offer More Than Opposition

Opposing Ford’s Managed Decline Isn’t Enough

(Happy to have friend of the site, New Leaf Liberal co-founder, and former PMO Special Assistant Nathaniel Arfin on the site today, writing about the state of the OLP and how we need to fight back against Doug Ford.)

As the latest allegations against Labour Minister David Piccini and the Skills Development Fund roil the Ontario government, there’s little sign the public have turned on Doug Ford. He’s still leading in the polls, even as government dollars go to PC donors and companies with ties to PC strategists. The press is doing its job, revealing the free tickets that earned one company millions and exposing the connections to Rubicon and other strategy firms that are earning companies millions in grants. But the Opposition is nowhere, and the government is trying to hang on as if nothing is happening

The Opposition ask tough questions in the Legislature, but the NDP and the Liberals can’t capitalize. Their efforts to raise the salience of the issue don’t work, and Ontarians aren’t rewarding them. When the Greenbelt scandal hit, Ford’s polls tanked, but recovered as soon as he apologized, killing any lasting impact of it. But, there’s an opportunity for the Opposition, if they want it.

Ford’s government has been defined by their corruption in so many ways, from the Stag And Doe and the Greenbelt saga to the handling of pandemic contracts and the routing of the 413. Pretending that the public will be moved to an enduring anti-Ford position by this set of corrupt actions would be naive in the most extreme. But that doesn’t mean that the Liberals shouldn’t talk about this, it just means the Liberals need to turn accountability and transparency into a virtue.

The McGuinty and Wynne years were not beacons of transparent and accountable government, with scandals surrounding most of that 15 year term. That fact makes the Liberals’ commitment to attacking Ford seem hollow, because the party is supporting a level of transparency that it would have failed to meet without acknowledging that fact. And that is how the Liberals can turn an anti-corruption message into a political winner for them, by owning their mistakes.

Bonnie Crombie’s decision to stay as interim leader of the Ontario Liberals gives her an opportunity to say the things that need to be said about the party’s past. As someone who wasn’t in the last Liberal government and without any connection to that era of the party, she can be honest about the party’s history. She can urge the party to embrace a stronger anti-corruption platform, and be credible to Ontarians while she does so.

That platform could include a standing independent inquiry into corruption modelled on the Hong Kong ICAC, with subpoena power and an independent ability to investigate based on tips from the public. It could include strengthening the lobbying ban so that former Cabinet Ministers like Christine Elliott can’t lobby for private health care interests after only one year out of Cabinet. It could include bans on Cabinet Ministers taking any gifts from companies or persons they have any authority or influence on, and reducing the threshold for accepting gifts to $50 or less for all non-friends and family members, to stop Piccini taking Leafs playoff tickets. Stopping government contracts going to companies represented by political advisors to the Premier could also be on the table. But until the Liberals promise to clean up Queen’s Park, these scandals won’t hurt Ford.

The Harper Conservatives’ win in 2006 showed the path forward here. The federal Accountability Act was a lynchpin of that campaign, making clear to Canadians that the Conservatives would not allow themselves the same corruption that the Liberals had indulged. More importantly, it was also a clean break from the Mulroney era corruption of Airbus and the Oliphant Commission. The Liberals need to similarly draw a line in the sand on the McGuinty and Wynne era and let the party move on by embracing a tough anti-corruption message.

If the Liberals want to earn the trust of Ontarians, they need to trust Ontarians enough to be honest with them. A renewed anti-corruption framework is a way to acknowledge to Ontario voters who voted OLP in the past but are now voting for Ford and the PCs that the last Liberal government wasn’t perfect, and we need to be better. If we want voters to trust us to be better than the PCs, we need to show Ontarians that we are better than we were.

We also need a renewed focus on solutions. Doug Ford is too busy aiding corruption for donors and connected companies to notice that our schools are a disaster right now. Teachers are underpaid and overworked, with cuts coming from school boards forced upon them by failed directives from Paul Calandra. The rush to strip local democracy from education because of a false narrative that trustees can’t be trusted, and therefore the Minister needs to nickel and dime expenses is especially ludicrous given the millions spent on low performing SDF grant applications that only got their cash because they hired the right firms. We need to make clear that Ford’s managed decline isn’t good enough, and we will be more and better.

The Liberals should commit themselves to a few basic principles now to rebuild their relationship with teachers and to show their commitment to education. A promise to never legislate instead of bargain, recommit to the lower class sizes that helped Ontario remain a leader in education under McGuinty and Wynne, and announce that a Liberal government will build new schools or expand existing ones so that students aren’t being taught in portables. The details of the last two promises don’t have to be set, because nobody will expect a party without a leader and less than a year after an election to announce how quickly they’ll get class sizes down or build more classrooms. But a focus on those goals will allow us to be taken seriously.

If the Opposition continues to expect the media to do the hard work of beating Doug Ford, the PCs will continue to win elections. The laissez faire approach of retweeting press articles and hoping that eventually people will understand Ford is bad has been proven to be a disaster. The Ontario Liberals need to provide a real alternative to Ford’s managed decline, and that starts with embracing real messages on anti-corruption and education that show our real commitment on issues that matter, and that show that the gravy train will actually end. Otherwise, the party will continue to languish, and these scandals won’t have any chance of hurting Ford’s prospects of winning the next election.