Randall Denley: Ontarians voted for the realism that only Doug Ford offered
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The strength of the PC plan is that it consists primarily of things that are already underway and in the budget. They aren’t making radical course changes
Doug Ford is not a person who is fascinated with policy. He’s a retail politician who’s good with people, Randall Denley writes. Photo by Carlos Osorio/Reuters Article content
Ontarians gave Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives a massive majority in Thursday’s election. That’s great news for Ford and the PCs, but it’s good news for Ontarians, too.
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Rather than voting for new, unaffordable service expansions, daffy plans to privatize long-term care homes or gimmicky buck-a-ride public transit schemes, Ontarians have chosen a middle-of-the-road government that will build more things, train more future workers and gradually expand the capacity of the province’s health-care system.
The strength of the PC plan, little remarked upon in the election, is that it consists primarily of things that are already underway and are in the budget. The PCs aren’t making any radical course changes.
While there was nothing surprising about the solid PC win, few would have thought four years ago that Ford would be winning a second majority in 2022.
The PC win is largely attributable to three things. First, Ford has matured in office. He’s a more balanced and compassionate leader than he was four years ago. Second, the PCs have solidified an expansion of their traditional rural and suburban base, winning seats that used to go to the NDP and the Liberals.
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Part of the credit goes to Monte McNaughton, Ford’s labour minister, who led a concerted effort to reach out to unionized private-sector workers. That paid off by undermining a traditional power base for the other parties.
McNaughton has done an outstanding job on the labour front overall, with programs for workers to get needed job skills and expanding the trades. He’s also made changes that make it easier for foreign-trained workers use their skills in Ontario. For a province with hundreds of thousands of vacant jobs, that’s a critical change.
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The third winning condition for Ford was the unbelievably weak campaign waged by the other two major parties. After their performance in this election, it’s not even certain that the Liberals can still be called a major party. Both the NDP and the Liberals ran unfocused, amateurish campaigns.
Ford crushed his two primary opponents, Steven Del Duca and Andrea Horwath. After losing his own attempt at winning a seat, and then resigning from the Liberal leadership, Del Duca’s provincial political career looks to be over. The dismal result for the Liberals — with just eight ridings won — guarantees them another four years at the bottom of the pile. Horwath announced her resignation Thursday night, too.
And the PCs now have a chance for a normal term of government, one not dominated by a pandemic.
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Thursday’s big victory will be far easier than what lies ahead over the next four years. Ford’s two biggest threats won’t be the leaders of the other parties, it will be inflation and rising labour costs. The PCs’ plans depend on keeping government spending to levels that are likely to prove unrealistically low.
There are big issues lurking in Ontario, ones that scant time was spent on during this election. They will be subtler and more difficult to handle than the pandemic.
Expect Ford to offer a business as usual, get-it-done kind of government. Don’t expect him to tackle big underlying challenges like overcoming the structural limitations of public health care, the province’s electricity generation and transmission challenges or its overly complex tax rules. Why does Ontario have two income tax surcharges, a health tax and a property tax for education?
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Doug Ford is not a person who is fascinated with policy. He’s a retail politician who’s good with people and his party’s approach reflects that. The April provincial budget that became the PC platform is a nuts-and-bolts document, and Ford is a nuts-and-bolts premier.
Perhaps Ontarians are tired of politicians who offer sweeping, utopian visions of a future in which government does more and more for us and we do less and less for ourselves. If so, that epiphany has not come a moment too soon.
Ford might not be an ideological conservative. He acknowledges as much, himself. The important thing that he does understand is the core conservative idea that people get ahead by striving, seizing opportunities and making their own way in the world.
Ford himself is an example of it — in politics. His leadership win in 2018 was an unlikely one and he had little support from the traditional party leadership. He saw his chance and took it, but many credited his win to the weakness of the faltering Liberal government. The 2018 election could have been won by any PC leader, it was said.
The 2022 win is all Ford and full marks to him.
Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com
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