None of the above, thank you - IRPP

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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