Ontario’s left-of-centre parties and their supporters need to accept a basic political reality. As long as they continue to split their votes three ways, they are going to lose election after election.
Recent polls couldn’t be much better for PC leader Doug Ford. The latest Leger poll for the National Post shows the PCs with 47-per-cent support. The Liberals are at 23 per cent, the NDP 17 and the Greens eight per cent. The PCs dominate in every geographic area of the province; there are no progressive strongholds left.
It’s a potential political disaster for the left-of-centre, but combined, the three parties attract as much vote support as the PCs. A single progressive party could be neck-and-neck with Ford, but divided, all three will be distant losers. That’s a recipe for long-term political disaster, and in leaders Bonnie Crombie, Marit Stiles and Mike Schreiner, the parties have just the people to prepare the dish.
Finding one good leader to represent the left-wing world view is clearly a challenge, but three? The problem is made worse by the fact that the parties seem destined to lose. That doesn’t attract people who want to accomplish something.
Are the parties different enough to justify their perpetual mutual destruction? It’s as if the people who favour French vanilla ice cream formed their own party to compete fiercely with those who prefer the vanilla bean alternative.
For PC supporters, this all sounds like a dream come true, but not quite. When a premier has no realistic fear of electoral defeat, it causes him to do things he might not do otherwise. Would Ford have called a premature February election if he thought there was any chance he was going to lose? Not on your life.
It’s not just that. Without a solid centre-left alternative, the PCs have drifted left themselves. Rather than focusing on balanced budgets and tax cuts, Ford’s version of the party features big deficits and actual boasts of “historic” levels of spending.
PC supporters might not like that, but what are they to do? Vote NDP? To be a real conservative party again, the PCs need a viable opponent just as much as the progressives need a single party.
The solution to this problem is easy to see, although it will be difficult to implement.
Let’s start by eliminating the Green Party. They have two seats, get vote support in the single digits, and their leader seems like a nice guy but he’s not exactly Mr. Charisma. The only thing the Green Party achieves is making it more difficult for another progressive party to succeed.
The NDP would seem the obvious choice to lead the left in that they are the official opposition with 28 seats, but the party has been trending downwards. When Liberal party support collapsed in 2018, the NDP had a glorious chance at success. Instead, the party fell well short, winning 40 seats and 32 per cent of the vote. The 2022 election was worse with 31 seats and just under 24 per cent of the vote.
The negative trend is continuing in this election. Poll support is down and only 13 per cent name NDP leader Stiles as the best choice for premier. Stiles has been leader for two years and who knows anything about her? At least former leader Andrea Horwath had name recognition, if only as the person who’d lost previous elections.
So, the Liberals then. Leader Bonnie Crombie started this election in a tough spot, with only nine seats in the legislature and no seat of her own. Without a solid core of incumbent MPPs who have a decent shot at re-election, winning power is a big challenge.
That said, Crombie has made affordability and housing promises that could resonate with the public, and they aren’t ideas the NDP had first. Crombie is promising significant tax decreases and she has a plan to reduce the cost of housing. These are the sort of real world issues that ideologically-driven parties tend to ignore.
Even the NDP is showing a modest drift toward reality. This week, Stiles said she would take the tolls off Highway 407, which would amount to a major subsidy for commuters and commercial trucking. The toll highway generated about $1.5 billion in revenue in 2023. That plan was a surprise from the bicycling party.
Maybe the parties on the left are starting to understand that if they want to take votes away from the PCs, they need to do it by moving to the centre. That’s where Ford has found his success.
Even with more appealing policies, both parties face a long road back to power. It’s a road that would be a lot shorter if they formed one party.
National Post
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