Category: Chairman’s Desk

As the Ontario campaign ads finally fall silent and much of the political rhetoric takes a pause, there is now time, on all sides of the political aisle, for some thoughtful introspection. I hope each of us reflects on the corrosive influence divisive partisanship, hyperbole and ambush politics have had on our collective confidence in our precious system.

Reflection is important because this behaviour is not benign. The proof? More Ontarians than ever stayed home on election night. This month’s provincial election had a record low turnout of 43 per cent. Looking to point a finger for that result? Well, there is more than enough blame to go around: pundits, reporters, media (conventional, new and social), partisan political actors, and the citizens themselves all played a role.

Long-term trust in our system has been actively traded away for a need to achieve short-term wins. Just as many lament the cost of short-termism on Bay Street, so do I lament its toll on our public life.

Unofficial election results indicated that, compared to the 2018 election, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and the NDP respectively received approximately 413,000 and 818,000 fewer votes this time.

Now all parties are guilty of less-than-stellar behaviour, to be sure. How many times have you heard someone say, “If I conducted myself like that in my workplace, I’d be sacked by lunchtime,” when speaking of behaviour in the legislature?

Many will recall the PC government’s overzealous use of clapping staffers; Steven Del Duca’s focus on phoney PC scandals during the writ period, which culminated with their embarrassing “gravy train” announcement; and Andrea Horwath’s promotion of misinformation about OHIP delisting, which came on the heels of her decision to break agreed-upon COVID-19 protocols in the Ontario legislature in an attempt to vote down government legislation.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that these are the kinds of dodgy political tricks that turn voters off politics.

Now, there is a structural answer to where all this comes from. In political offices, at all orders of government right across the country, you will find the same thing. More opposition researchers and proverbial spin doctors than policy wonks. More people working on the taxpayers’ dime to play silly buggers than to responsibly develop and advance new policy ideas.

Parliaments — founded as deliberative and thoughtful assemblies, places for civil debate and the exchange of ideas — have become circus tents with political theatre, half-truths and personal political attacks in the centre ring.

Like a misplaced gamble on a unicorn stock, the cost of this buffoonery has been the legitimacy and relevance of our democratic systems.

Too often, our elected officials are now forced to focus their efforts on protecting themselves from political punches, rather than talking about the issues that matter most — the cost of living, health care, and housing affordability. Not to mention jobs and the economy. In short, the very issues that got them into power.

So, what to do? For starters, we could professionalize the “political staffer class.” The province’s integrity commissioner, for example, found that political staffers are undertrained and desperate for help.

Not to knock political aides — they are some of the hardest-working people in the country — but our politicians would be better served by staff with experience not just inside politics, but from outside as well.

That’s only the beginning. Politicians need to learn to resist what is currently an insatiable urge to knock their opponents down whenever they can, and think instead about their role in protecting the health of our system for the long run. They need to realize that partisan political blinders really are damaging. That they have, as elected officials, a higher duty.

After all, politics not only can be better — it needs to be better. For all of us.

From the get-go, it usually isn’t a fair fight. Most times, incumbency gives government a significant advantage as it seeks another mandate — a benefit that was on stunning display on election night in Ontario.

Incumbency provided the opportunity to present a pre-election budget which dangled all kinds of goodies, available only after a vote to return the Progressive Conservatives to office. It granted the ability to exploit the “rallying around the flag” effect from the pandemic and to dominate the news cycles for more than two years, effectively relegating opposition leaders to the sidelines.

Ontario’s campaign mirrored the last federal one, in which Justin Trudeau’s incumbent Liberal government was re-elected thanks to the failure of opposition campaigns to land any meaningful ideological blows or compete with an engorged government.

The dismal results from the efforts of Steven Del Duca, Andrea Horwath, Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh might well lead one to conclude that opposition politics in Canada has become a fool’s errand. But that would be a mistake. Provincially, at least, the opposition should have been able to frame the election as a referendum on the affordability crisis, a crisis which is taking hold in every home in the province. That alone should have provided them with an effective conduit for harnessing public resentment.

But they failed, and failed miserably. The estimated 14-point drop in turnout is damning evidence that the opposition campaigns were completely ineffective in convincing Ontarians it was time to say “yes” to an alternative.

However, don’t assume the past is prologue. In fact, the race for the leadership of the federal Conservative party signals that things might be changing.

Friday was the last day to sign up members in that race. In the final week, the party rushed to hire extra staff; sales were tracking to smash previous records with estimates of an influx of roughly 400,000 new members, compared to the 269,469 memberships sold the last time.

Getting people to not just support but to join a party is an accomplishment in itself, and in this case, I believe it’s proof something is up. I think it shows that candidates in that race, Pierre Poilievre especially, are effectively harnessing the anger, disillusionment and sense of disconnection felt by many Canadians.

Now to the next phase. With the book closed on new member sales, it is time for each candidate to articulate bold new policy ideas that will form the basis of a platform that will keep Canadians saying both “no” to the incumbent Liberals and “yes” to a rejuvenated Conservative Party of Canada.

Regardless of who wins, the new leader will spend the next three years taking on a government that’s expert at using policy to achieve its political aims. For proof, you need to look no further than its decision to wait to roll out ready-made, preordained gun control legislation deliberately on the heels of a horrific mass shooting in the United States.

That said, it is a government long in the tooth, and one that’s experiencing waning popularity. While support for the Conservatives is encouraging, for that support to hold this leadership race needs to focus less on posturing and more on policy than it has done so far. Candidates now need to show they are the one who can develop the tools necessary to compete with a resource-rich incumbent and win.

Mercifully, there’s lots to work with. They can start with the bleak economic outlook and a policy orientation which, by the admission of former finance minister Bill Morneau himself, is focused more on wealth redistribution than on creating prosperity.

Taking on incumbents is never easy. To win, the new Conservative leader will need to be relentless in putting on offer a path to a brighter, better future for all Canadians. It is simply not enough to be, as former U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew once remarked, “a nattering nabob of negativism.”

Even though Ontario’s 43rd general election is now just four days away, the results seem to be a foregone conclusion. For all intents and purposes, every sign indicates that Doug Ford and his incumbent Progressive Conservatives will be returning to Queen’s Park to govern Canada’s most populous province for another four years.

Why? Because Ford’s message has, once again, resonated with voters.

For a series of reasons, the plans Steven Del Duca and Andrea Horwath have put forth to address the issues top-of-mind for voters have simply not been convincing. Rather, a plurality of Ontarians appear to remain convinced that the PCs are best positioned to address the pocketbook issues they care most about.

With the horse race question seemingly answered, others remain. Will Horwath keep her job as leader of the official Opposition — or of the Ontario NDP, for that matter? Will the Liberal leader win his own Vaughan-Woodbridge riding?

On the other hand, Ford faces a different set of questions and challenges. Should he sail to victory as anticipated, PC politicians, pundits and staffers will rightfully celebrate another electoral breakthrough.

That said, their honeymoon will be short as the reality of continuing to govern an intricate and complicated province sets in.

Ontario faces a host of challenging issues, and the new premier does not have the tools to deal with them all. In fact, when you look at the issue set, you might well conclude winning the election means winning a booby prize.

First off, Ontarians are facing a severe affordability crunch. As I’ve previously written in this space, this has been the “affordability crisis” campaign.

The extent and impact of this crisis cannot be overstated. As Canada’s inflation rate skyrocketed to 6.8 per cent in April — a 31-year high — the prices of everyday essentials, like gasoline and food, ate into the finances of every Canadian family. Food prices alone have risen nearly 10 per cent over the past year.

Given the provincial government’s limited control over monetary policy, a PC government faces an uphill battle when combating the price of everyday essentials without resorting to costly subsidies or tax breaks — political levers the provincial treasury can no longer easily stomach.

Meanwhile, housing affordability continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate, pushing first-time home buyers and families further behind. The average price of a home in Ontario, inflation-adjusted, has risen 44 per cent since 2018, reaching a record $871,688.

The core of the issue is that demand for housing across Ontario continues to outpace supply. While the PCs have smartly positioned themselves as the pro-construction and development option, they will need to actually deliver.

The new Ford government simply must fulfil their election promise to build 1.5 million new homes. After all, in the last decade alone, Ontario’s population grew by over 1,600,000 people.

And then there is our dismal financial standing. Fifteen years of Liberal overspending, COVID-19 pandemic subsides delivered at previously unimagined levels, a war in Ukraine, a looming global recession, and worldwide supply chain issues all conspire to make a bad situation even worse.

As Ontario’s debt rises to a projected eye-popping $468.4 billion by 2024-25, delivering a plan for fiscal balance will be no easy task.

Many of the Ford government’s political missteps in the early days of its first mandate were attributed to the pursuit of a balanced budget. Resuming that path this time around will be undoubtedly contentious once again. It will require a careful trade off between the public’s appetite for structural change, and the financial reality on the ground.

To complicate this equation, a renewed PC government will have to contend with a serious backlog of urgent hospital procedures and another round of negotiations with public sector workers, including teachers.

Turns out the fabulist Aesop may well have been right when he said “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.”

Clarification — May 30, 2022: Ontario has the largest population of all provinces and territories in Canada. A previous version of this article said it was simply the largest. As well, it was clarified that Ontario’s debt, not its deficit, is projected to rise to $468.4 billion by 2024-25.

On the eve of a provincial election, the NDP were counting their losses. Many of their union members, particularly male workers, were not just flocking to the Progressive Conservatives but doing so in droves after the progressives had alienated them. Policies that had been designed to save public sector jobs ultimately did not represent their interests.

It’s ancient history now, but this story of the 1995 election showdown between then-NDP premier Bob Rae and PC leader Mike Harris could just as easily be the story of the 2022 Ontario election.

On the evidence, Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario have every reason to feel good about their prospects at this stage in the campaign. And one of the key reasons is they have done what few other conservative parties in this country could — win over organized labour.

To be sure, Ford hasn’t won over the entirety of the labour movement, something that would be sure to raise eyebrows among his base. But political observers should take note: Ford has chipped away at the labour establishment and swooped in to win the support of construction unions slighted by the previous Liberal government. The result? A powerful new political coalition.

At the time of writing, six labour unions — the electrical workers, the boilermakers, the painters, the pipefitters, the sheet metal worker and, of course, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) — have all endorsed Ford.

Together, these unions hold a combined membership of over 50,000 workers. To put that in perspective, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, Ontario’s most prominent teachers’ union, represents about 78,000 members.

This is Ford’s second LIUNA endorsement. After he took office, he never took that 2018 endorsement for granted. Rather, he immediately set to work consolidating his relationship with the union. As a result, the relationship has blossomed ever since, and served as a stepping stone to deepening connections with other labour groups in the construction sector.

Ford also worked to rebalance the scales between workers and employers by improving working conditions for Ontario’s blue-collar and low-wage workers, from Uber drivers to dishwashers, especially in the wake of a global pandemic that exposed how critical these positions are — and how we undervalue them.

To do so, Ford abandoned a number of traditional “red meat” conservative policies. His government raised the general minimum wage, guaranteed digital platform workers the tips they earned and enshrined their protection from reprisal. Ford then went on to adopt progressive policies like the right to disconnect, and washroom rights for truck drivers and delivery workers.

The Ford government also invested in skills development, giving labour unions the funding to train and upskill workers. In 2022 alone, his government earmarked $1.2 billion in skills training, with portions of that funding going directly to unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Ontario Pipe Trades Council, LIUNA and others.

In the new labour divide between remote work and essential work, Ford has made clear where he stands.

And that’s the key: the simplicity of Ford’s message of “yes.” Contrast that with NDP Leader Andrea Horwath’s messages around cancelling highway projects and reversing cuts to gas taxes, and guess whose message really resonates with union members wondering where their next paycheque is coming from?

The transformation has been as spectacular as it has been stark. Teachers, nurses and pipefitters no longer see eye to eye on the progressive agenda. Not all, to be sure, but elements of organized labour have now divorced themselves from the left and its traditional ideological home, embracing Ford’s PCs and their populist appeal to the working class in the process.

Ford’s efforts should serve as a model for other conservative politicians who often find they have to struggle to build a winning coalition. Ford has demonstrated that the untraditional pairing of conservative politics and labour unions has the power to fundamentally reshape the political landscape.

On the eve of a provincial election, the NDP were counting their losses. Many of their union members, particularly male workers, were not just flocking to the Progressive Conservatives but doing so in droves after the progressives had alienated them. Policies that had been designed to save public sector jobs ultimately did not represent their interests.

It’s ancient history now, but this story of the 1995 election showdown between then-NDP premier Bob Rae and PC leader Mike Harris could just as easily be the story of the 2022 Ontario election.

On the evidence, Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario have every reason to feel good about their prospects at this stage in the campaign. And one of the key reasons is they have done what few other conservative parties in this country could — win over organized labour.

To be sure, Ford hasn’t won over the entirety of the labour movement, something that would be sure to raise eyebrows among his base. But political observers should take note: Ford has chipped away at the labour establishment and swooped in to win the support of construction unions slighted by the previous Liberal government. The result? A powerful new political coalition.

At the time of writing, six labour unions — the electrical workers, the boilermakers, the painters, the pipefitters, the sheet metal worker and, of course, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) — have all endorsed Ford.

Together, these unions hold a combined membership of over 50,000 workers. To put that in perspective, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, Ontario’s most prominent teachers’ union, represents about 78,000 members.

This is Ford’s second LIUNA endorsement. After he took office, he never took that 2018 endorsement for granted. Rather, he immediately set to work consolidating his relationship with the union. As a result, the relationship has blossomed ever since, and served as a stepping stone to deepening connections with other labour groups in the construction sector.

Ford also worked to rebalance the scales between workers and employers by improving working conditions for Ontario’s blue-collar and low-wage workers, from Uber drivers to dishwashers, especially in the wake of a global pandemic that exposed how critical these positions are — and how we undervalue them.

To do so, Ford abandoned a number of traditional “red meat” conservative policies. His government raised the general minimum wage, guaranteed digital platform workers the tips they earned and enshrined their protection from reprisal. Ford then went on to adopt progressive policies like the right to disconnect, and washroom rights for truck drivers and delivery workers.

The Ford government also invested in skills development, giving labour unions the funding to train and upskill workers. In 2022 alone, his government earmarked $1.2 billion in skills training, with portions of that funding going directly to unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Ontario Pipe Trades Council, LIUNA and others.

In the new labour divide between remote work and essential work, Ford has made clear where he stands.

And that’s the key: the simplicity of Ford’s message of “yes.” Contrast that with NDP Leader Andrea Horwath’s messages around cancelling highway projects and reversing cuts to gas taxes, and guess whose message really resonates with union members wondering where their next paycheque is coming from?

The transformation has been as spectacular as it has been stark. Teachers, nurses and pipefitters no longer see eye to eye on the progressive agenda. Not all, to be sure, but elements of organized labour have now divorced themselves from the left and its traditional ideological home, embracing Ford’s PCs and their populist appeal to the working class in the process.

Ford’s efforts should serve as a model for other conservative politicians who often find they have to struggle to build a winning coalition. Ford has demonstrated that the untraditional pairing of conservative politics and labour unions has the power to fundamentally reshape the political landscape.