After winning only two in five seats, Wynne needs to change the channel.
by Geoffrey Stevens
The jury is still out on Ontario’s Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne. That much, at least, seems clear from last week’s provincial byelections. The Liberals went into the fray with five seats, all held by former cabinet ministers; they came out with just two.
When she became leader and premier early this year, Wynne faced two challenges. The first was to make a clean break with her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, with his administration (of which she had been a part) and with the legacy of mismanagement and scandal he left behind. The second was to demonstrate that she and her administration represent a new game in town.
She has done a fair job on the second front, setting a new tone for the government: kinder, gentler, more progressive and more inclusive. This success is reflected in Wynne’s personal popularity in the polls. But the first challenge, breaking with the McGuinty past, is proving more difficult than even she probably anticipated. The trio of McGuinty-era albatrosses –- hydro generating plants, Ornge ambulance, and the earlier eHealth misspending – still hang around her neck. There is no sign that they are going to go away any time soon.
Two out of five is not good enough for Wynne. Her minority government is more at risk this week than it was last week. A provincial election this fall seems likely.
The Liberals knew they going to lose Windsor-Tecumseh to the NDP’s Percy Hatfield, a popular city councilor and former CBC broadcaster, and they hoped to contain the damage to that one seat. My guess had been that they would lose two – Windsor-Tecumseh and either London West (where the NDP had a powerful candidate in Peggy Sattler) or Etobicoke-Lakeshore (where the Conservatives fielded Toronto’s deputy mayor, Doug Holyday). As it turned out, they lost all three, retaining only Scarborough-Guildwood (with civic activist Mitzie Hunter) and Dalton McGuinty’s old seat, Ottawa South (where McGuinty’s long-time constituency assistant, John Fraser, parlayed his intimate knowledge of the riding and its voters into a victory for the Liberals).
Two out of five is not good enough for Wynne. Her minority government is more at risk this week than it was last week. The prospect that she might make it through to 2014 before having to call, or be forced into, a provincial election, is fading. An election this fall appears increasingly likely. She won’t be able to win it unless she manages to change the channel – to make voters stop thinking about the problems of the McGuinty past and start thinking about the promise of the Wynne future. It won’t be easy.
On the other side of the Queen’s Park coin, two out of five is spectacular news for NDP leader Andrea Horwath. Victory in London and Windsor gives her momentum going into the fall session of the Legislature. Her price for continued support of Wynne’s Liberals has suddenly gone up, perhaps dramatically.
But pity poor Tim Hudak. The Progressive Conservative leader performed disappointingly in the 2011 election. It was his to lose, and he lost it. A year ago, the Tories were blown out in the byelection in Kitchener-Waterloo, a supposedly safe Tory seat. With five seats up for grabs last week, Hudak desperately needed to bring home some goodies. The Conservatives talked boldly about London West, Ottawa South and even Scarborough-Guildwood, but all they could bring home was Etobicoke-Lakeshore.
That win did give the provincial Tories their first seat since 1999 in the city of Toronto. But that is scant consolation. They did not win the seat because of Hudak, but rather because they had the celebrity candidate in Doug Holyday, with campaign assistance from Mayor Rob Ford, the India rubber ball of municipal politics.
Although Hudak’s job is not in immediate jeopardy, the voters did put him on notice last week.
About Geoffrey Stevens
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at the address below. This article appeared in the Waterloo Region Record and the Guelph Mercury.
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