Wynne, Del Duca, And Running With The Past

How The Liberals Can Move On And Win

One of the biggest threats to a Liberal government in Ontario is the question of the past, and the McGuinty-Wynne legacy that was thoroughly rejected by the electorate at the last election. The legacy is eminently defensible, and in many ways laudable, and in many other places it is a catastrophic failure. Honestly, that’s par for the course for a government that was in office for 15 years – the good and the bad both pile up. Unfortunately, too many Liberals are unwilling to reckon with the legitimate failures of that era, and that failure could risk them not winning the election this year.

The Liberals should know as well as anyone the risk of not having a good answer to a previous term in office, since they’ve spent the last 25 years taunting the NDP for not having a good answer on the Rae government, and the NDP’s failures to have a good answer continuously fuck them. And yet, despite this fact, the Liberals have no idea what their answer to the very legitimate grievances many have over their record in government.

I’m not going to litigate the record, but the party that got 19% of the vote and reduced to a rump caucus cannot go into the next election trying to claim that there was nothing wrong and actually the Liberals were awesome, dontcha know. If they do that they’ll get crushed and they’ll deserve every second of it. What the Liberals need to do is own that their record is, in many places, good, but also be willing to accept that Wynne (and to a lesser extent McGuinty) got it wrong. (To be clear, the reason there’s less need to differentiate from McGuinty is just about time – he’s been gone for almost a decade, whereas people’s memories are much more about Wynne’s 5.5 years.)

The trick for Del Duca et al will be to find one way to signal their independence from the past without undermining the policy agenda – especially the offers around free prescriptions and (kinda) free tuition for university – and fortunately, the opening exists. One of the main complaints around the Ontario government currently is that Ford is in hock to the developers, and is making decisions to benefit his corporate friends. Allegations of influence peddling and insider dealing extend back to the cancellations of gas plants under the Liberals, and even extend to the concern that the NDP are bought and paid for by the unions (which, let’s be honest, they are). And that fact gives the Liberals the opening they need.

We need an Independent Commission Against Corruption.

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A feature of Australian state politics for decades and originally from Hong Kong, the concept of an ICAC is clear – a standing remit to investigate corruption as it sees fit, separate and distinct from any political interference or the whims of those elected. A judicial panel, in effect, the ICAC would be a strong disciplinary force in politics, but also an even stronger deterrent force, because the existence of the ICAC would (ideally) make people think twice about behaviours that would end up in front of the ICAC.

It’s a move that the voters would almost uniformly approve of, and which would be good for the governance of Ontario. If the Liberals are really trying to be a different party than the party widely derided for being corrupt in the past, then what would signal the fresh, new Liberal Party than this policy, while allowing the party to continue to campaign on the policy successes of the past?

“Ontario Liberalism, but without the corruption” was basically what the NDP were offering in 2018, and that’s certainly what they pitched to soft Liberal-NDP switchers in the runup to the 2018 vote, and now the Liberals have a way to get all those voters back without having to throw Dalton and Kathleen under the bus or having to pretend that those governments didn’t exist. You want to run on the wage increases Dalton gave out to nurses and the expanded prescription coverage that Kathleen gave us? Offer an ICAC, and the voters will know you’re serious about being different where it matters.

It’s not an automatic election winner, but politics can be about symbols as much as about concrete actions, and this policy is the symbol which unlocks a lot of different doors for the party. It opens the door to attacking Ford for his cronyism, it makes Horwath have to either defend corruption or be seen as following the Liberals (again, after mandatory vaccination for teachers and healthcare workers), and it makes the Liberals look like a serious party who are leading where others follow. It’s a win win for everyone involved, and if the Liberals adopt it as policy, they’re also moving the debate away from COVID into what the post-pandemic future looks like, which is where they need to focusing anyways.

This policy is the exact sort of bold move that I wrote last week about Del Duca needing to win, and this is one where we know it can work and we can adopt an existing model. Yes, once (hopefully) in government there might have to be some consultations on scope and how exactly the government wants it to work, but to argue that something that’s an institution in most Australian states couldn’t work in Ontario would be bad politics for the other parties, and we know ethics can be a winning election issue, given how hard Harper went on the issue in 2006 (before being scum in office, but I digress).

At the end of the day, the Ontario Liberals will not get many chances to signal their difference with the past, allow themselves to still run on the policy successes of their past, and propose a policy that would be universally popular with the voters. The answer is simple – a Liberal Party interested in victory in June will come out for an ICAC, or at the very least a very credible ethics and anti-corruption policy. Let’s hope they do.