In a previous column it was postulated the current PC premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, will be a one-termer. (Canada Free Press, Dec. 6, 2020). So if this turns out to be true, who will lead the Ontario government after the next election scheduled to take place in June 2022?
It is perhaps better and certainly easier to begin by a process of elimination; which parties or leaders will not govern after Ontarians go to the polls in a year and a half from now? To begin with, we can rule out the Green Party of Ontario. Although party leader Michael Schreiner became the first member of his party to sit in the Legislature after the last election, no one is suggesting the party is currently anywhere close to obtaining party status let alone governing.
Belinda Karahalios and her husband Jim are in the process of forming a new (or if you prefer, a real) conservative party. Belinda was elected as the PC MPP for Cambridge in 2018 and was thrown out of the Conservative caucus by Ford after she voted against Bill 195. That bill extended the premier’s emergency powers to deal with the “pandemic” and therefore these powers did not have to be debated in the Legislature.
Jim Karahalios, a former PC and CPC activist, has accused both parties of corruption. He is also known for his campaign to “Axe the Carbon Tax.” He was sued by the party when it was led by Patrick Brown after Karahalios claimed voter fraud in the nomination processes. That case was dismissed after the court found it to be a SLAPP suit, brought simply to silence Karahalios. Karahalios is also suing the party after he was defeated in his bid to become party president. He is alleging voter fraud in this case. (Jim K New Blue)
The idea of a new party, named the New Blue Party, seems to be garnering a lot of support from conservatives fed up with Ford and the PC Party. The Karahalios’s submitted about 2,500 signatures to Elections Ontario, an initial requirement in having the party registered. Only 1,000 signatures were required.
There appears to be similarities between the excitement over this party and that of the recently formed federal People’s Progressive Party that obtained 40,000 members in its first year. But this did not translate into votes or seats. Even if the Karahalios’s can do well and win one or more seats, any chance of forming the government is years away.
Now we come to the NDP. Older voters remember the havoc inflicted on the province when the Bob Rae’s NDP governed between 1990 and 1995 and won’t make that mistake again. For many others, the party is simply not appealing.
During the 2018 election campaign some of the polls were reminiscent of the polls during the 2016 American presidential election. These polls showed the NDP getting a massive majority when in fact it was the Ford Tories who obtained a majority. Many of those in the NDP caucus are young radicals who would give anything to live in a world led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk. The Dippers will always have their hard core base but will not attract enough swing voters or dissatisfied Liberal voters to form the next government.
And it doesn’t help the party is led by three time loser Andrea Horwath who led the party to defeat in 2011, 2014 and 2018. If Horwath couldn’t lead her team to victory in 2018 when the Liberals all but disappeared, she never will.
This leaves the Liberal Party of Ontario that was in power between 2003 and 2018 and showed it was one of the most corrupt governments in Canadian history. A couple of examples. eHealth was a program designed to put the health information of Ontarians online. That became known as the “billion dollar boondoggle.” After approximately one billion was spent giving lucrative contracts to friends and supporters of the Liberal Party hardly anything was accomplished.
There was also the gas plant scandal where the Liberals spent another billion dollars or so moving two gas plants, then under construction, out of Liberal ridings where they were unpopular and could have caused the defeat of Liberal candidates.
There is a common misconception about why the Liberals were reduced to seven seats in 2018. That is that the voters threw them out because of their corruption. As good as that sounds, that is not the reason the long-time governing party almost disappeared.
There is no better proof of this than Justin Trudeau. If corruption was the reason Liberal voters rejected their party, the Trudeau Liberals would have been soundly defeated in the 2019 federal election. They would have become the Volkswagen Beetle party and Justin would be back teaching drama part time while wearing blackface and putting the moves on his students. Instead the federal Liberals were merely reduced to a minority. No, corruption had almost nothing to do with the near wipeout of the Liberal Party of Ontario.
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Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were decimated for one reason and one reason only; the cost of hydro. Ontarians saw their hydro bills go up dramatically month after month after month. This was presumably to fight “climate change” but in reality it was to reward lucrative contracts to Liberal-friendly companies.
Many Ontarians really did have to choose between “heating and eating.” Others had to sacrifice other spending to pay these outrageous bills. Still others worried they would not be able to manage in the future. And even those who could easily afford to pay these bills not only saw the injustice in it but realized Wynne couldn’t care less about the poor and others she so vigorously claimed to champion.
The Liberals however have a new leader; Steven Del Duca. Del Duca has been playing it right by essentially remaining out of the fray as Ford takes the heat for either closing too many businesses or not locking down enough and killing people. And of course only hard core NDP supporters ever listen to Horwath.
No, if the Liberals under Del Duca can convince the electorate their hydro bills will remain reasonable they have a good chance to come back. As long as Liberal voters can be assured they can afford to pay for hydro they won’t be bothered by corruption.
There is however one other alternative. A PC party without Doug Ford has a reasonable chance of remaining in power after 2022. Perhaps the party could dump Ford as they did Patrick Brown and elect a new leader who at a minimum will refrain from calling the party’s base names such as “buffoons” and “yahoos.”
In a previous column it was postulated the current PC premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, will be a one-termer. (Canada Free Press, Dec. 6, 2020). So if this turns out to be true, who will lead the Ontario government after the next election scheduled to take place in June 2022?
It is perhaps better and certainly easier to begin by a process of elimination; which parties or leaders will not govern after Ontarians go to the polls in a year and a half from now? To begin with, we can rule out the Green Party of Ontario. Although party leader Michael Schreiner became the first member of his party to sit in the Legislature after the last election, no one is suggesting the party is currently anywhere close to obtaining party status let alone governing.
