Is it me or does that feel like the softest majority government of all time?
At the beginning of this campaign, most Ontarians were searching for a reason not to vote for Dalton McGuinty. Sure, his government was “moving forward” on a lot of important fronts — public education, health care and reversing downloading on municipalities being at the top of the list.
But the government, like its leader, really didn’t seem to have a personality.
You had the feeling that people really, really wanted John Tory to give them a reason to vote for him. A decent man with an impeccable business record. (Anyone who emerges unscathed after being commissioner of the Canadian Football League has earned his stripes.)
He seemed like someone could put the progressive back in the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.
And then along came misery — in the form of his proposal for faith-based school funding. A miscalculation of catastrophic proportions, it alienated the party’s core voters. If it was intended to woo the many voters from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds in places such as Mississauga, it was sadly misconceived.
As Tory candidates across Mississauga found out, those people are putting their children in public and Catholic schools not because they can’t afford private ones, but because they truly value the experience their children receive there.
When Tory listened to all of the dissenters in his caucus and the media, copping out with a “free vote” alternative that everyone saw through, Leadership Matters turned into Leadership Malfunctions.
“It was a killer,” David Brown said last night as he celebrated — quite rightly — a solid campaign that never really had a chance of victory. Brown pulled 33.2 per cent of the vote, more than any PC candidate in the city with the exception of incumbent Mississauga South MPP Tim Peterson.
One local Tory candidate actually asked Tory not to talk about faith-based funding publicly when he was in a local riding early in the campaign. The local candidatdes were all in damage-control mode for most of the campaign.
At the end, Brown sent out a final piece called Setting The Record Straight that stated: “On faith-based funding, it will involve lengthy public consultations, town hall meetings throughout the riding, and a free vote.” It included this quotation from the candidate: “After the local consultations are completed, I will vote the will of the riding.”
There was no question what that will was in this campaign, Brown said, an unequivocal no.
Then there was Mississauga South, a microcosm of Leadership Malfunctions. The price of letting Tim Peterson across the floor was fatal: a revolution in the local ranks that meant most Tories sat out the campaign or went to other ridings and a nasty confrontation with a spurned candidate that painted the leader as autocratic and undemocratic. Not to mention the fact that a re-motivated local Liberal Association was able to rally behind a candidate who was clearly superior to Peterson.
The jump in the Green vote in the South, from 2.4 per cent in 2003 to 8.82 per cent this time around isn’t all a reflection of people’s admiration for David Johnston’s fledgling birding skills. More like some disaffected Tories found a passenger pigeon for their protest.
Finally, a word about the riding-that-time-forgot. Can anyone be a better example of the mercurial magic of politics than Amrit Mangat?
Two months ago she was quietly minding her own business working in her husband’s law firm in Brampton when the powers-that-be decided she fit the profile the Liberals were seeking in Mississauga-Brampton South and she became the chosen one.
You get an appointment, you run a quick little campaign, you collect a tidy little 53.63 per cent of the vote (the second-largest plurality in Mississauga after Peter Fonseca) and you get to play a little MPP.
Who says this politics stuff is so tough?