What’s The Correct Way To Beat Ford?

On Rejecting False Binaries

(Liam MacKinnon comes back on to talk about my beloved Ottawa Senators and clown on the Leafs after a big Battle of Ontario on the Scrimshaw Show!)

There’s been some chatter that Doug Ford’s position in the polls is now less unassailable than before, and it’s definitely true. Bonnie Crombie’s resignation swung an 8% increase in the OLP’s polling in Abacus, and Liaison now has the gap between the OLP and PCs at a mere 4%. My model, for what it’s worth - very little at this stage of the electoral cycle, especially given the Liberals don’t have a leader - would have the PCs at 64 seats, only two seats away from falling below the majority government threshold. So, happy days, right?

Not quite, because there is about to be the most nauseating and frustrating leadership race in recent memory, where everyone fights about whether the Liberals need to pivot right or pivot left. It’s a nonsensical fight because nobody without a crippling addiction to politics speaks in those terms, but also because it is extraordinarily easy to appeal to both Conservatives and New Democrats to form a winning coalition - and the next Liberal government provincially will have to do that to win.

In 2024, I wrote a column saying that Bonnie Crombie needed to be both tough on crime and tough on the causes of it, and one of my ideas in that column was to describe the ODSP doubling that I expected Crombie to endorse - which she, much to her credit, did - as a crime prevention measure. It is objectively one, in that reducing poverty reduces crime and paying people on ODSP more will reduce poverty, and at a time when suburban voters were worried about crime, it made sense to pitch this progressive policy in a language the suburbs would like more. We didn’t do it, and the suburban breakthrough Crombie promised never came.

I’m not saying any one announcement would have won us government, but the last two leaderships didn’t do a good enough job of selling their ideas to the broad swathe of Ontarians who might have liked them. The obsession with whether we were in the right place ideologically overshadowed whether voters would like what we’re selling, as if they care more about abstract concepts than good ideas.

Something like my Commission Of Audit is another situation where the same policy can be sold very differently in different areas. The point of the commission of audit is to find cuttable spending so that those dollars can be reinvested in better ways that won’t help Doug’s gravy train but will help average Ontarians. In suburban ridings where the swing vote is well off social liberals worried that the Liberals will tax and spend their way to economic malfeasance, the commission of audit is a way to reassure voters that we won’t be profligate, or go for tax rises before we have to. In downtown Toronto, you sell that same policy by pointing out that we know we need to spend a lot to fix Doug’s problems, and we’re looking for every dime and dollar we can to do all the things we need to get done.

It’s a singular policy and message that can travel, and gives local candidates an ability to sell local messages. In Halton, where the school board is wildly underfunded and the province is essentially letting education in the region crumble in front of our eyes, the priority would be on boosting per pupil funding. In Toronto, there’s transit concerns to take care of and the ever present housing crisis. In working class cities like London and Windsor, where the party will need to rebuild, priorities around investment in manufacturing and training will take centre stage, and when talking to University and college students, undoing Ford’s OSAP bullshit.

But all of those arguments are strengthened by a core message - that before we look to raise taxes or borrow more, we’re going to look at every dollar Doug Ford was spending to make sure we couldn’t use it better. That core message underlines both our progressive bonafides - that we want to spend more on crucial priorities like education and housing and health care - and signals to centrists/moderates/conservatives that we’re not going to spend recklessly or foolishly. But it’s one message and one policy.

There will be policies the next successful Liberal campaign takes that will code as “conservative” and there will be others that code as “progressive”. To win, we’re going to have to do both, because going from 30% of the vote to 40% requires bringing in people who didn’t vote for us last time. It’ll require more than just saying we’ll spend more money, but it’ll also require articulating how Ontario’s managed decline is affecting people from all walks of life in all places and how we’ll fix it, which will take money.

We need to embrace pro-market solutions in some places - like getting the government’s taxes, fees, and burdensome planning regulations out of the housing market’s way, for one - while also embracing governmental solutions, sometimes on the same file. As much as market housing is needed to solve Ontario’s problems, we also need to build a shitton of more transitional and supportive housing. Is such a Housing platform an attempt to pivot right or left? It’s both, which really makes it neither. It’s an attempt to solve Ontario’s problems.

On any individual issue, be it health care, housing, education, transit, long term care, post secondary, the environment and energy, and all the various levers that could be bundled together into “the economy”, there will be various solutions to problems. Some will be good and some will be bad, some will be “conservative” and some “progressive”, and we’ll fight about it. That’s the point of politics - we’re not all going to agree on everything, even within a party. But anybody who comes at the solutions we need through a predetermined ideological lens is full of shit. We need good ideas that can advance the idea that Ontario can be better than it is if we simply got rid of the dogshit incumbent government, whatever they look like and however they code.