None of the above, thank you - IRPP

22
NONE OF THE ABOVE,
THANK YOU
Robin V. Sears
A very low level of engagement resulted in a historically low turnout in the October
6 Ontario election, with 51 percent, an outright majority, staying home. The
turnout reflected the desultory quality of the campaign. In a province preoccupied
by jobs in a still fragile recovery, Tory Leader Tim Hudak talked about tax cuts and
mused about “foreign workers,” driving away multicultural voters. Meanwhile,
Dalton McGuinty secured an unlikely third term, even as he seemed tone-deaf to
the economic anxieties of Ontario voters. Finally, stealing a page from Stephen
Harper’s playbook, he asked for “stable, majority government.” He didn’t quite get
one, thanks to the strong campaign of NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. Contributing
Writer Robin Sears offers a veteran insider’s view of the campaign.
L’infime intérêt suscité par une campagne décousue explique le taux de
participation d’une faiblesse record aux élections ontariennes du 6 octobre dernier,
51 p. 100 des électeurs refusant de se déplacer pour élire un gouvernement en
quête de majorité. Dans une province préoccupée d’emplois sur fond de reprise
fragile, le chef conservateur Tim Hudak a parlé de réductions d’impôt et qualifié de
« travailleurs étrangers » les électeurs des communautés ethniques, qu’il s’est ainsi
aliénés. Dalton McGuinty a pour sa part décroché un improbable troisième mandat,
même s’il a semblé tout aussi sourd aux angoisses économiques de la population.
Volant in extremis à Stephen Harper une page de son scénario électoral, il a réclamé
un « gouvernement majoritaire stable », qu’on lui a refusé à un siège près, ce dont
on créditera la solide campagne de la chef du NPD Andrea Horwath. Notre
collaborateur Robin Sears offre de la campagne un compte rendu d’initié.
Elections are rarely exercises in exorcism. But two
political ghosts repeatedly hauled out to frighten voters
and small children were finally banished by
Ontario voters. The Liberals tried one more time to brandish
the threat of a Mike Harris redux but dropped it early on as
voters were no longer frightened by a premier retired more
than a decade ago. The Conservatives eventually dropped
their anti-Bob Rae rhetoric as NDP Leader Andrea Horwath
was clearly not him, and, as she pointed out with a wry
smile, he was leader of another party today.
Elections are normally exercises in democratic choice.
With only 49 percent of Ontarians voting, a recordlow
turnout, the other 51 percent said, “None of the
above.” Disengagement was the order of the day. This
unprecedented abstention raises several unpleasant issues
for the government, for all the political elites and for the
future. With fewer than one out of four voters choosing
the governing Liberals, as they head into what could be
another recession and face some very tough choices about
whose services to cut first, it is not the sort of mandate
elections usually deliver.
OPTIONS POLITIQUES
NOVEMBRE 2011
THE PROVINCES
ONTARIO
LES PROVINCES
To ensure the message was not lost, voters denied
Premier McGuinty a majority; he is the first premier in a
quarter century to receive such a slap. True, he fell short by
only one seat, but as Conservatives and New Democrats
observed, a shift of fewer than 5,000 votes in the right
places would have seen him defeated.
The Ontario economy has never really recovered from
the 2008 recession. It was kept on life support by a combination
of American, Ontario and federal government stimulus
spending until the summer of this year. At a cost of
500,000 jobs lost and more than $52 billion of new provincial
debt in the last three years, not to mention the federal
stimulus program and the auto bailouts, the battle against a
structural decline in Canada’s largest economy and export
engine was very expensive. Some economists believe that
merely to avoid another round of layoffs and factory closings,
another round of stimulus, pushing debt and deficits
higher once more, will be required this winter.
W hen
first Europe and then the United States started
to go wobbly this summer, Ontario’s export-led

economy was sure to follow. By the
day the writ was dropped, just after
Labour Day, there were warning signs
from some economists that Canada
could not resist the double whammy
of a decline in the US and shaky
European markets. By the night of the
one real leaders’ debate, three weeks
later, deep concern was the order of
the day in stock markets, finance ministries
and central banks across the
developed world. Voters conveyed
their worries to thousands of party
canvassers across the province with
mounting anxiety and even anger.
This dramatic change in voter expectation
and anxiety was slow to
move the party strategists. It was not
until the debate week that the parties
began to reshape their messaging to
reflect the prospect of a potentially grim
winter ahead. Andrea Horwath predictably
and wisely, given her base,
focused on those who would be most
severely hit by another winter of layoffs.
The McGuinty campaign stole a page
from the Harper playbook and pleaded
for a majority under proven leadership.
Improbably, and foolishly, the Hudak
campaign stuck to its anti-tax message,
not understanding that voters afraid of
being laid off worry more about getting
paid than paying taxes.
For the McGuinty government, the
experience of an earlier regime suffering
a sudden hole appearing in the economy
may be instructive. Bob Rae’s unexpected
and unprepared government
faced an even harsher political nightmare
in September 1990, taking office
on the cusp of the deep recession of
1990-91. The despair that engulfed the
province by mid-winter 1991 had been
only a shadow on the horizon during
his campaign. Rae could not claim to
have inherited the hole in the Ontario
economy from the defeated Liberal government
before him, though he tried. It
grew so quickly that an alleged budget
surplus in the spring had become a billion-dollar
political boat anchor by fall.
(Disclosure: By then I was helping to
Andrea Horwath predictably and wisely, given her base, focused
on those who would be most severely hit by another winter of
layoffs. The McGuinty campaign stole a page from the Harper
playbook and pleaded for a majority under proven leadership.
Improbably, and foolishly, the Hudak campaign stuck to its antitax
message, not understanding that voters afraid of being laid
off worry more about getting paid than paying taxes.
sell the province’s debt as Ontario’s senior
Asia trade diplomat.)
Like David Peterson waltzing to
defeat in a similarly sunny summer
campaign, Dalton McGuinty whistled
vigorously past the economic graveyard
from the campaign’s beginning until
almost too late. Curiously, he adopted
the pose of a premier who had vanquished
the recession, bragging about
classrooms, waiting rooms and factory
jobs delivered during his second term.
His campaign bus, plastered in a word
cloud of boasts and statistics, was quickly
dubbed the “bragging bus” by critics.
The party’s flagship TV ads were of
Premier Dad standing alone on screen
quietly boasting of his achievements.
It was a strangely tone-deaf
approach for a government seeking a
third term at the tail end of one gruesome
recession, while visibly teetering
on the edge of a double dip. For those
who believe it is rarely their enemies
but Liberals’ own arrogance in power
that most often defeats them, this
almost became a textbook case. A more
thoughtful campaign team would
have begun with an expression of chagrin
at the pain of the recession and its
impact on their ability to deliver. A
more self-aware premier would have
dialed it back a few notches.
Several ministers and influential
Liberals pleaded with the Liberal war
room to insert some humble pie in the
Premier’s message, to no avail. As one
None of the above, thank you
said privately, “For Chrissake! We didn’t
create the recession, we don’t have to
apologize that it made it impossible for
us to do things we wanted to do! We’d
look better if we ‘felt their pain’ before
telling voters how great we had been.”
Ontario voters are traditionally unimpressed
by braggadocio, and Dalton’s
“humble father” stance probably
saved him from a more
punishing election night
result, given the gap between
the government’s claims and
the bleaker reality experienced
by many Ontarians.
But what definitively
saved them from real electoral
humiliation was the
astonishing naiveté of the Hudak campaign
team. Conservatives in Canada
and around the world carry the burden
of being seen as the party of “angry old
white guys.” The federal Conservatives,
in less than a decade, have done an
astonishing job of erasing that deeply
ingrained perception. Like social democrats’
vulnerability to charges that they
“couldn’t run a peanut stand,” conservatives
must always be cautious not to
open their vulnerability to charges that
women, gays, the young and brownskinned
Canadians are not part of their
coalition.
In this respect, Hudak and his campaign
team could not have been
more foolish.
First they attacked a proposed
Liberal program designed to help “foreign
workers,” as Hudak called them. It
was indeed a curious plank to put in
the campaign window: costed at less
than $20 million it would have done
little; targeted at less than a thousand
workers a year, it would have benefitted
few. Some wags dubbed it “Jobs for
Foreign Ph.D. Cabbies.” By piling on
so vehemently against it, however,
Hudak reinforced the suspicion among
many Ontarians that in contrast to the
Liberals’ “Forward Together” message,
Tories did not include some groups in
their vision of the province’s future.
There was an approach to whacking
the Liberals’ cynically divisive
POLICY OPTIONS
NOVEMBER 2011
23

24
Robin V. Sears
politics that one could have imagined
a more adroit campaign team delivering.
If the Tory messaging had been to
attack the Liberals for creating division,
to champion their own plan for
immigrant integration, the damage
would have been contained. If they
had campaigned on the “One Ontario”
theme that the Liberals had used
against them four years earlier, Hudak
might have been premier.
Meanwhile the foolishness of the
two larger parties gave NDP Leader
Andrea Horwath her first campaign
traction. She was able to dismiss each
competitor’s attempt at a “Southern
strategy” style of American politics,
positioning herself as a different kind
of politician.
Television debates have come a
long way since the days when a sweaty
upper lip or a good one-liner could end
a career. Today they are the centrepiece
of modern electoral politics in
almost all of the established democracies.
Even the United Kingdom which,
perhaps typically, had resisted them
for nearly half a century finally succumbed.
Arguably, David Cameron
and Nick Clegg govern Britain today
on the strength of their debate performances.
Much of the media pundit class has
failed to keep up with what makes
debates important in the eyes of voters.
They still tend to score them
like a basketball game or a
contest between teens on a
high school debating stage,
rewarding points for style and
wit and form. Those are not
the tests that voters bring to
the contests. In campaign
after campaign, good qualitative
researchers have demonstrated
that debates are not about zingers
but about character.
They are the only moment in the
life of a campaign when voters,
peering through the camera lens, get a
glimpse of a leader’s soul. They see the
quality of leadership under stress. They
spot the truth, or the attempt to conceal
it, in the frightened glances that
OPTIONS POLITIQUES
NOVEMBRE 2011
every other event in modern politics
does its best to distort, exaggerate or
prevent.
It is the moment when two guys
in a bar turn to each other and say,
“Glass jaw, eh?” as happened to
Michael Ignatieff. He simply looked
pole-axed when Jack Layton thundered
at his chronic absenteeism during
the English-language federal
leaders’ debate last April. It is the
moment when a husband turns to his
wife and says, “I know he’s smart, and
he’s good at this stuff, but I just don’t
trust him.”
It is because the risks and rewards
are so high that smart campaign strategists
do not allow the final debate to
be too close to election day. It’s not
possible to recover in time from a bad
performance. Liberal and Conservative
strategists were already muttering,
“Never again!” after this campaign’s
single debate, which the broadcasters
had pushed back to the final nine days
of the election.
On the strength of his debate performance,
Dalton McGuinty seemed
not to have understood what voters
would judge as a win. Usually experience
tells in debate contests. The first
time you leap without a safety net into
a competition in front of hundreds of
thousands of people, whether as an
Olympic athlete or a political debater,
it is not likely to be a polished, confident
performance. You won’t be cool
under attack, or capable of sliding the
knife in with a smile. Curiously,
McGuinty was worse in this debate
than in his previous rounds.
Like an over-confident high school
best boy, he exploded into living rooms
waving his hands, blathering statistics,
with a silly grin that made one wonder
what his handlers had pumped him
with in the green room. The rapid-fire
recitation of hospitals, schools, highway
miles and minutes of recovered
wait times was almost Pythonesque. If
you closed your eyes you could almost
be listening to a Soviet era, five-yearplan
speech on the “Economic
Achievements of the People.” As both
his opponents pointed out, again and
again, it was a curiously tone-deaf
stance to offer to a province with more
than half a million unemployed voters.
Hudak did better, but he suffered
in the authenticity stakes as well. He
restrained his robotic attack impulse
and avoided the nasty edge that his
voice takes on when in that mode. He
was compelling about the failures in
the long run of the McGuinty government
and scored the sound bite of the
night when he told McGuinty: “With
respect, sir, nobody believes you anymore.”
Hudak was less effective on his
vision of a better future. He, like his
campaign strategists, seemed to believe
that his message about tax cuts leading
to job creation would be compelling
without offering even broad hints
about how this legerdemain would
actually deliver. His opponents and the
media were rough on this gap on the
night and later. In a curiously revealing
insight into his own discomfort
with how his handlers were forcing
If the Tory messaging had been to attack the Liberals for
creating division, to champion their own plan for immigrant
integration, the damage would have been contained. If they
had campaigned on the “One Ontario” theme that the
Liberals had used against them four years earlier, Hudak
might have been premier.
him to perform, asked to rate his own
performance later, he laughed and said
he had been a little “too unscripted”
and should have stayed on message
better.
Horwath should not have done as
well as she did, being a newcomer
both to debates and to leadership. Her
handlers were spooked when she delivered
a wooden and clumsy perform-

ance only a few days earlier in a oneon-one
debate with Hudak in
Northern Ontario. Improbably, as if to
demonstrate how arrogant and
Toronto-centric the McGuinty government
had become, he refused to join
them for the debate in Thunder Bay.
Hudak and Horwath dropped regular
sarcastic references to his absence in
the TV debate. “We missed you in
Thunder Bay,” she said with a killer
smile. Northern voters punished the
slight on election night.
Unwisely, Horwath used her son’s
experience with a hospital waiting
room as an example of the failures of
the health care system. It seemed
forced on the night and several times
later she had to clarify what actually
happened. Similarly, Hudak used his
daughter’s painful medical battles for
political gain that night, and many
parents and voters winced. McGuinty,
who sometimes offers bizarrely
detailed updates on his family life, was
more appropriately reticent. He made
up for it on election night in a
maudlin speech that singled out every
family member, staff person and colleague
for special thanks.
The NDP Leader is an unusual
woman politician, neither
Thatcherite in her adoption of a gender-bending
masculine stance, nor
Palinesque with flirtatious riffs for the
guys in the front row. Her comfort
zone is clearly feminine — a mother,
a proud daughter and a self-confident
woman — but her winning smile conceals
an edge and a spine that is now
acknowledged by erstwhile opponents
in the party and now in the
media. She used, unfairly, the hesitation
of three men, including the mod-
None of the above, thank you
CP Photo
Andrea Horwath learned well the lesson of Jack Layton’s campaign: smile and put out a positive message. Though Dalton McGuinty
won the Ontario election, she clearly ran the best campaign, resulting in Ontario’s first minority Legislature since 1985.
erator, sharing a stage with one
woman to sneak shots in at her opponents,
and to undermine their performances
with quick jabs. TVO’s
Steve Paikin, Canada’s debate moderator
extraordinaire, was slow to discipline
her pushing the boundaries.
Enragingly to her opponents, she
also slid over policy gaps and even
made a couple of curious bloopers —
she described Samsung as a “publicly
owned company” which would come
as a surprise to its shareholders — that
no one noticed. Several times, each of
her opponents froze, mid-sentence,
mum in their fear of appearing to pick
on a woman, even as she attacked
them. Her position on camera between
her two opponents gave her great positioning
on TV. She merely had to hold
her arms wide as if to say, “Boys,
Ontario expects better!”
POLICY OPTIONS
NOVEMBER 2011
25

26
Robin V. Sears
In politics, it is not usually an advantage
to be the newcomer, a woman
and the pollsters’ choice as weakest
competitor. The licence, the light scrutiny
and the room Horwath was granted
by her opponents was, perhaps, the
exception that proves the rule.
She did not give much of a glimpse
of the detail of an NDP government,
and critics complained that of the
three she looked the least like a premier.
Her team chuckled at the sniping,
confident that she had done what she
needed to do: look like she belonged
on that stage, and that under pressure
she was a competent and confident
performer. Three polls in rapid succession
confirmed their confidence, as
Horwath’s profile and approval slowly
lifted in the campaign’s final days.
The campaign’s closing days were
anti-climactic as the three campaigns
attempted to solidify their positions.
The New Democrats continued to
pound their “who will fight for you
message” with confidence and a leader
who not only did not stumble but visibly
grew in confidence. Horwath’s final
rallies were large and boisterous, while
the Liberal war room cruelly put out on
their various websites hidden camera
shots of Hudak delivering his stump
speech to rooms more than half empty.
The sense that his campaign had
stumbled irretrievably came in the final
days when the Tory campaign promoted
a leaflet that was explicitly homophobic,
slandered teachers as a profession and
made bizarrely false claims about sex
education in Ontario schools. It was as if
some internal gremlin had set about sabotaging
each potential growth area for
the party, demographic by demographic.
Having made any Ontario voter who
had ever been humiliated by being singled
out as a ‘foreigner’ feel insulted
once more, the Tory campaign then
OPTIONS POLITIQUES
NOVEMBRE 2011
attacked the tolerance of urban
Ontarians about sexual orientation. For a
deadly icing on this political cake, they
attacked the profession that had represented
the key flash point of the Harris
era: Ontario teachers.
On election night, the Hudak campaign
failed to break through in
Toronto or other parts of urban
Ontario, where the gay community
and those who see inclusive treatment
of their friends in that community as
A more professional campaign by the Tories, focused on a
positive and inclusive conservative vision of Ontario, would
probably have come much closer to victory, especially in 905,
where the same multicultural voters who had flocked to
Harper deserted Hudak following the “foreign workers” foray.
something that makes them proud of
their province. They lost the new
Canadian communities in the arc of
seats across northwest suburban
Toronto that Harper had done so well
in only a few months earlier, sweeping
21 of the 22 ridings in the suburban
905 belt around Toronto. They racked
up wasted majorities in small town,
rural and Eastern Ontario, dooming
most of their star candidates to defeat.
The results were surprising in a
number of tight races where strong
incumbents, and several ministers, went
down to defeat. But in the province
overall the shift of 17 seats to the combined
opposition parties for a government
seeking a third term in a recession
was hardly surprising. A more professional
campaign by the Tories, focused
on a positive and inclusive conservative
vision of Ontario, would probably have
come much closer to victory, especially
in 905, where the same multicultural
voters who had flocked to Harper deserted
Hudak following the “foreign workers”
foray. The NDP might have elected
another half dozen seats with only a few
more votes appropriately scattered. But
given from how far behind they had
come, given that very few voters had
ever heard of their leader at the beginning
of the campaign, they were pleased
with their gains.
Since its glory days under David
Peterson, the Ontario Liberal Party has
been famous for a self-regard, a dismissive
approach to those outside their
political family. This arrogance, even
more offensive to many voters after the
Liberals’ eight years in power, was visible
throughout the campaign. On election
night the premier hailed his
supporters and thanked his voters as if
he had just won a massive new mandate.
The messages from the Premier’s
Office in the days following were not
encouraging to those who
thought a slice of contrition
and humility were the
appropriate response to leading
a minority government.
His team leaked to reporters
the names of opposition
MPPs they would seek to get
to cross the floor. Some went so far as to
spin that they expected to be in power
for four more years and would govern as
if they had a majority.
Horwath, in a gracious election
night concession speech, called on her
two opponents to govern in recognition
of the voters’ nuanced message to
all the parties, saying that she expected
to meet with them soon to begin
planning the new session. Hudak had
done the same. In an elegant and emotional
speech, Hudak made it clear that
he is a far more interesting and
nuanced politician than his campaign
had permitted him to reveal. He avoided
the kind of tub-thumping in which
the Premier indulged. It was the sort of
concession speech at the end of which
professionals from every political tribe
nod to each other and say, “He’ll grow.
He’ll be back.”
Astonishingly, in response a week
later, the Premier announced that he
would not have any discussions with
either of the two opposition leaders
before the opening of the new
Legislature. The government will want
to listen to its worried friends and
allies about the need to adopt a less
provocative stance to governing, given
that they will be selling a very bitter
political message to Ontario voters in
the weeks and months ahead.

28
Robin V. Sears
The collapse in support for democracy
that the electoral turnout reflects
cannot yet be dissected for detailed
analysis. It will be surprising, however,
if the academic number crunchers,
pollsters and psephologists do not
point to a continuing decline in the
participation of voters under 30 and to
the hesitant participation of new
Canadians. Even more sadly, such an
analysis will probably reveal a widening
class divide in the province
between those with property and
those without. It is the sort of voter
disengagement for which Canadians
have long sneered at the United States
that we now appear to have allowed
ourselves to develop.
It will not be easy to respond in policy
or political terms to the delegitimization
of the party elites implied by
such a low voting rate. Efforts to reach
out to new and young voters and discuss
the reasons for their feeling of disempowerment
will have to be an
important step. Encouraging the parties
to revive their local activist bases
to include voters who are not merely
aging white homeowners will also be
key. No one in political life should dismiss
the seriousness of a continued
slide in participation.
It will be hard to win broad support
for the tough measures any Ontario
government will need to implement to
regain fiscal credibility. It will be impossible
if those who feel the most alienated
from politics see governments’
decisions as deliberately favouring
those who have and vote, over those
who have not and don’t. The reasons
for some of those voters’ disengagement
can be seen from a car window in
many parts of Ontario today.
OPTIONS POLITIQUES
NOVEMBRE 2011
The devastation and despair were
visible to the leaders in this campaign,
as never before. As the three leaders’
buses crisscrossed the province in a
glorious late-summer September, they
would have noticed how dramatically
the province has changed. As recently
as the last deep recession, the one that
Horwath, in a gracious election night concession speech, called
on her two opponents to govern in recognition of the voters’
nuanced message to all the parties, saying that she expected to
meet with them soon to begin planning the new session. Hudak
had done the same. In an elegant and emotional speech, Hudak
made it clear that he is a far more interesting and nuanced
politician than his campaign had permitted him to reveal.
afflicted the Rae government in the
early 1990s, Ontario was still mostly a
prosperous province.
Today, a prosperity map of
Ontario resembles a war zone after
years of artillery pounding. Pockmarked
by endless shuttered factories
and dying shopping malls, many
parts of Ontario now feature industrial
bomb craters, as it were. Yet there
are pockets of shining prosperity,
often nearby. If you started your
leader’s tour day in Waterloo and
ended it in Welland, you would slide
from glittering high tech prosperity
to rust belt desolation.
The booming tech suburbs of
Ottawa are only an hour away from the
abandoned factories, motels and peeling
main streets of a dozen nearby
towns. The farther you travel from the
905 arc of prosperity that runs from
Oakville to Oshawa, the more the failed
motels, mills and abandoned farms
make up the view from any highway.
The hollowing out of Canada’s
richest province began long ago —
along with the widening gap between
the affluence of the skilled and the
burgeoning army of the blue collar
unemployed. But it is in this latest
harsh recession that the holes have
become visible in almost every region.
Each leader faces challenges in
addressing this new reality.
Premier McGuinty could not have
failed to contemplate how much worse
off some of these unhappy voters and
communities will be when the cuts
begin to bite. Hudak will no doubt have
wondered about the wisdom of his
claims of the hundreds of thousands of
jobs his tax cuts were promised to deliver.
Horwath, as a single mother, knows
better than most the fear of a lost job or
even the unbudgeted collapse
of an old car and will
have seen the fear in the
eyes of Ontario voters as her
bus rolled through yet
another declining town.
As the Premier settles
into his third term, his
Finance officials will gingerly
reveal how much worse
the public fisc is than they had cheerfully
informed him only three months
earlier. The memories of warm latesummer
campaign days will be replaced
by the shock of the first early snow and
chillier economic news by the week.
As they begin the inevitable
slices into public expenditure in
preparation for their first grim budget,
one may hope that the Premier
and his team recall those bereft faces
and the sad, sagging cities and
towns they roared through on their
return to power. It is in the Wellands
and Thunder Bays and Pembrokes
that every cut in nurses and teachers
and highway crews is felt first. And
in the broken neighbourhoods of
Ontario’s inner cities, every afterschool
and child care cutback hits
harder than in the wealthy condos
nearby.
The Premier might even mutter a
silent apology to Bob Rae for all the
sport at his expense. Now it’s
McGuinty’s turn to attempt the daunting
task of balancing the demands of
bond markets and child care, the
demands of shrill economists and
bankers versus angry laid-off breadwinners.
Winter will come early for
Ontario this year.
Contributing Writer Robin V. Sears is a
principal of Ensight Canada. He is a former
national director of the New Democratic
Party. rsears@navltd.com