Why we (the Ontario Liberals) lost the 2018 election:

There is a falsehood that is believed by an upsettingly high number of Ontario Liberals: That we lost the 2018 election because we were “too left wing.”

I am not saying that I think we could have won another majority on June 7th. What I seek to do with piece is to convince as many Ontario Liberals as I possibly can that there are big structural issues with our party that we need to fix before the next election.

TLDR: Liberals obsess over the “air war” (messaging and how we are viewed in the press) and we don’t focus enough on organizing on the ground. We were in government for 15 years and instead of having a permanent class of engaged activist members we over-relied on staffers and lobbyists to run our campaigns.

“Move to the Centre”

First let me address the argument that a handful of people are espousing, that the Ontario Liberal Party was too left-wing in 2018.

I cannot psychologize those who put forward this argument. There may be a good faith argument here but it is purely based on anecdotal evidence.

That good faith argument usually looks like this: LiBeRaLs InCrEaSeD tHe MiNiMuM wAgE tOo FaSt AnD dIdN’t Do EnOuGh To FoCuS oN tHe DeFiCiT.

In reality, Ontarians loved almost all of our policies. The minimum wage increase polls at the mid-to-high 60s. The economic evidence is also on the side of those wanting a living wage. In 2018 employment grew by 1.1% and the Liberals left office with the lowest unemployment in 40 years.

The centre has moved in Ontario politics. It makes perfect sense to me that a main proponent of this falsehood is Sandra Pupatello, who last ran as an OLP candidate in 2007. Ms. Pupatello is out of touch with the people of Ontario in 2019. The position isn’t seriously held by people who were actively involved in the OLP during the last election.

Right now the “right wing” position on the minimum wage is to keep it at $14/hour. This is amazing to me as I worked in opposition research for 5 years and during a previous PC leadership I saw Christine Elliott repeatedly promise to freeze and possibly roll back the minimum wage when it was under $12/h. The PCs have also shifted on Full Day Kindergarten. In the elections since the program began (a massive increase in the size of government by supposed moderate Dalton McGuinty) they promised to scrap FDK (2007, 2011, 2014) and now the Minister of Education Lisa Thompson rushed to assure Ontarians that her government would protect FDK. The latest program that the Liberals implement, OHIP+, was stopped from expanding to those over 65 years of age by the PCs. However they kept universal pharmacare for those under 25 even though the program was still a pretty new program.

Our policy platform was widely supported across the province. And those who didn’t vote for us, voted for parties that, broadly speaking, supported our program. Remember, 60% of Ontarians didn’t vote for Doug Ford.

Yes, Kathleen Wynne was unpopular but her policies were not.

From all the post-election polling analysis I’ve seen, I have actually come to the opposite conclusion of those calling for a move to the middle. If anything, the big policy reason that lead to us only winning 7 seats was a right-wing policy, privatizing Hydro One. Our own government polls showed that 2/3rds of the province were opposed to the “expanded ownership” of Hydro One.

The 2014 election was a debate over the size and purpose of government. Tim Hudak’s PCs were the ones who favoured cuts and privatization. Kathleen Wynne was able to eat the NDP’s lunch/support by passionately championing progressive, activist government taking on the big challenges Ontario faces. To win a mandate after a campaign like this and then almost immediately turning and privatizing a gigantic, Ontario-owned asset immediately burned up a huge pile of Premier Wynne’s good will and popularity.

Dalton McGuinty’s government raised the minimum wage 7 times and created full day kindergarten. Raising the minimum wage to close to a living wage and then tying it to inflation to give businesses certain and full universal child care are 2 bold progressive policies that build on the accomplishments of a previous Liberal administration. There are many big challenges facing Ontario and running on bold, popular solutions to these problems seems like a good idea to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I sincerely hope you find my argument persuasive but even if you don’t agree with me, our policy/message was one small part of the reason we lost so badly in 2018.

The real reasons we (The Ontario Liberals) lost:

I have divided my list of reasons we lost so badly in 2018 into 2 broad categories: Things that were in our (the Ontario Liberal Party and the Liberal government’s) control and things that were outside of our control.

What we controlled:

1. There is no permanent Ontario Liberal activist class.
2. The Premier quitting on June 2nd.
3. Alienating our union allies.
4. Dragging our feet on nominating candidates.
5. Internalizing the politics and policies of austerity.
6. Completely ignoring populism.
7. Campaign finance rule changes.

There is no permanent Ontario Liberal activist class.

Every Ontario Liberal Party member is a communications expert.

That is what any neutral person who observed our 2018 provincial council and 2019 AGM would have to conclude. Liberals are obsessed with how we communicate our policies and message in the media/on television/on social media (the “air war.”) This obsession means we ignore the incredibly important work of organizing on the group which is where elections are actually won.

This preoccupation came into stark relief for me at the post-election 2018 Ontario Liberal Party Provincial Council. In the closed door session on accountability the people on stage were the ones primarily responsible for the air war part of our campaign (Tim Murphy, Andrew Bevan and David Herle.) Yes, all three refused to accept responsibility for the magnitude of our loss but they showed up and answered difficult questions for an hour.

Moira McIntyre and Chad Walsh, the two people who ran the 2018 OLP campaign ground game were not in attendance at the accountability panel. Even worse, no one else really seemed to notice.

I worked as an opposition researcher for the Ontario Liberal Caucus for 5 years. I have attended countless PC and NDP events as an observer (including leadership and policy conventions.) I was always envious of how engaged and hungry PC and NDP members were at these conventions.

Both parties have what I call an “engaged activist class.” This means that outside of government these have thousands of volunteers who are doing the work on the ground between elections to identify supporters and move the debate on policy issues to their party’s position. The PCs have rich donors and the business community as permanent pillars of their coalition. The NDP have the labour movement, environmental activists and racial justice activists. Both the PCs and the NDP do a solid job of supporting folks they are aligned with at the municipal level (as school board trustees and on municipal councils) as a sort of farm-team to provide provincial candidates who have name recognition and campaigning experience.)

How did the Ontario Liberal Party atrophy so badly on this important front?

After 15 years in power we were over reliant on using political staffers to run our campaigns (and in more than 4 ridings, we had staffers run as candidates for our party. All of them were really superb candidates and they brought down the average age of our 2018 candidates but they were nominated late for an election we knew the date of the day after the previous campaign ended.)

Two quick examples of how much we relied on staff: I was asked to serve as campaign manager in the great riding of Whitby (where I haven’t lived since 2012) a week before the writ dropped. My good friend Zach, who is President of the PLA for the great riding on London North Centre, attended a training session for campaign managers just over a month before the election and he was one of the ONLY non-staffers there.

By relying so much on staffer members doing political work in their spare time, we increased the rate of staff burnout and ensured that our election machine was half-built. We also lost a lot of big public debates which helped build the negative narrative against our party and undersell our accomplishments.

The other reason that our activist class disappeared is that for 15 years there has been no real value proposition to being a member of the Ontario Liberal Party. I have been an active OLP member for more than half of my life. In that time I have not been able to: Vote directly for the person who leads my party, nor have I (and all other members except for a very few) been able to set the platform that the party runs on each election.

The PCs let their members vote directly for leader, the NDP do as well but then weight the vote to give labour representation. In our party you vote for someone who may or may not vote for the person you want to be leader (after the first ballot.) In the 2013 leadership, the party had 44,421 members but only 2016 delegates voted on the final ballot (a whole bunch of them, 15% were ex officio delegates who were beholden to no one.) That’s only 4.5% of the party directly voting for leader.

In the 2015 Ontario PC leadership their party swelled to 76, 587 members. In their 2009 leadership they had fewer seats than us and they still managed to sign up 43, 000 members. While the 2015 leadership was marred by the 407 data breach scandal, the 2015 leadership had more than 100 000 members vote (The number they used publically, after Vic Fedeli supposedly did an audit of their membership was 200 000 but take that with a grain of salt.) The PC Party has been eating our lunch at maintaining a large, engaged membership. Thankfully, at the 2019 OLP AGM 57.7% of the party voted to reform our leadership process but sadly that large majority wasn’t enough to change the party constitution. It is also good news that declared leadership candidates Michael Coteau and Alvin Tedjo both supported a One Member One Vote system and while he abstained from the vote, Steven Del Duca pledged to create a panel on party reform if he wins the leadership.

The PCs have a fairly directly policy process but like the OLP, the leader can largely ignore the membership. However, a higher percentage of the policies passed at PC conventions make it into their platform. The NDP’s constitution ensures members have a greater say over policy than the other parties. While the policy debates at NDP conventions don’t play well on TV they are extremely important. They give activists a reason to join that party and they ensure that NDP members are incentivised to come to conventions and knock on doors during elections to win the seats to ensure the policies can be implemented.

The lack of a policy process has had many negative outcomes for the Ontario Liberal Party. Before I give examples I want to note/thank OLP President Brian Johns and VP Policy Damien O’Brien who have done a great job revamping the OLP policy process.

Here are four examples of how the lack of a member-driven policy process hurt the Ontario Liberals before and during the election:

Hydro One: As I noted at the beginning of this piece, this was an extremely unpopular policy. OLP members were totally on board with the investments in infrastructure that the H1 privatization was supposed to pay for but we just ran against Tim Hudak’s privatization plan and in favour of creating a massive government program (an Ontario Pension Plan.) From the date this was announced until the last day of the 2018 election, our members had to defend a huge, unpopular decision they had no say in.

The Minimum wage: Like an overwhelming number of Ontarians I support a $15 an hour minimum wage tied to inflation. However, mere days before this policy was announced, our MPPs were criticizing the NDP for going too far too fast on the minimum wage. Party members and the business community felt a pretty big whiplash after this announcement. A real policy process would have encouraged the fantastic #FightFor15 activists who build a movement across Ontario to join the party and push this policy. It would have also meant that the business community would have seen this fairly massive change coming (They might have still opposed it but it would have given more certainty.)

OHIP+: This was and is a really great policy. Unfortunately, most Liberal staffers/activists found out about it when it was announced on budget day. A program that was an excellent foundation for universal pharmacare didn’t get the rollout it deserved because the people who should have been promoting the policy to the people of Ontario had to learn the details of a complicated program at the same time as the rest of the province.

Releasing the “platform” half-way through the election: The NDP released their platform on April 16, 2018, two months before the election. They were able to do this because they have a policy process that actually consults their membership. This gave them a huge advantage over the Liberals during the election. It got media attention when they released it and NDP activists were able to read it a month before they had to sell it at the door. During the election people knew where the NDP stood on the important issues facing the province. Contrast that to what the Ontario Liberal Party did during the election. They dragged their feet on releasing a platform and then published a rehash of the 2018 budget half-way through the campaign. We live in a 24 hour news cycle and our politics has been one of permanent campaign for many years. There is no longer any advantage to saving your platform for two weeks before voters go to the polls. For the first half of the campaign when you knock on doors you are reminding voters of the past but you couldn’t really say what the Liberals would actually do if we won except for more of the same.

Being in government for 15 years, many small decisions lead to a demobilizing of Liberal activists. I believe the main reason we lost so badly was what I have articulated above.

However, there are other actions that were taken deliberately by the people who ran our party that also contributed to our massive loss in 2018 and should be avoided or rectified as we rebuild.

The Premier quitting on June 2nd.

I can remember exactly where I was when I saw Kathleen Wynne announced that she was not going to lead the Ontario Liberal Party anymore after the election.

I have been punched in the stomach about half a dozen times in my life. Watching this press conference felt worse. We were 5 days away from E-Day and I felt like the last 6 years of my life were torn up in front of me. We were in the fight of our lives, supposedly safe seats, like Toronto-St. Paul’s where I was campaigning, were at risk. This was demoralizing and is one of the worst decisions in any political campaign ever.

For the last week of the campaign I channeled my rage and disappointment into becoming a door knocking machine. I heard over and over again that people who would normally have voted for the Liberal candidate in my riding were going NDP this time because “the Liberals gave up.”

As if our volunteers weren’t already demoralized by how low our poll numbers were and 5 years of conservatives and New Democrats telling horrible lies about one of the most honorable people to ever serve the people of Ontario.

This gambit didn’t save a single seat. The next Liberal Leader will likely have to contest multiple elections before becoming Premier. Giving up should never even be considered.

Alienating our union allies.

On September 11th, 2012 our government ( the one that first won in 2003 thanks to a huge amount of support from the teachers’ and nurses’ unions) passed the orwellian named “Putting Students First Act.” This bill (found unconstitutional in 2016) imposed contracts on teachers and support staff and limited their ability to strike.

This bill was so unpopular that most Liberals opposed it. During the 2013 OLP leadership every single candidate (including Sandra Pupatello) said they would repeal Bill 115 but even after picking the progressive Kathleen Wynne as our new leader the damage was done. Teachers were no longer a reliable Liberal voting block, and rightfully so.

Then towards the end of the 2018 campaign, we started to promise that our first act in the next parliament would be to bring in back-to-work legislation to force York University workers to stop striking. Instead of saying, “How can we ensure that these hard working educators and support staff can feed themselves, their families and live comfortably?” we tried to out-flank the NDP from the right. This was a desperate move and what did it accomplish? Maybe, if I’m being generous, it ensured that PC candidates beat NDP candidates in a small handful of ridings.

If Ontarians want to vote for an anti-union, anti-worker party who will priorities the rich, they will vote for the PCs. Unions make society better. They gave us weekends, ended child labour and they drive wages up for non-unionized workers. Selfishly, no Liberal government gets elected to a majority campaigning against unions. Our treatment of the labour movement also sends a message to every other working-class Ontarian.

There are many ways to go after the NDP and Andrea Horwath. Trying to out-PC the PCs isn’t one of them.

Dragging our feet on nominating candidates.

Robin Martin is objectively awful. She is a really terrible MPP and the people of Eglinton-Lawrence deserve so much better. How did a person of no substance who regularly retweeted pro-Trump BS manage to defeat Mike Colle, a really effective constituency MPP who has some of the sharpest political instincts in the province? The PCs nominated Robin Martin over a year before the election.

While the PCs nominated many candidates a long time before the election campaign began (Yes, yes, some of that blew up in their face but the damage wasn’t actually that widespread) we held off holding nominations in ridings like Toronto-St. Paul’s and Toronto-Centre.

If there is one thing that Liberals are obsessed with as much as we are the air war, it is so-called “Star candidates.” Ontario has a fixed election date law. We knew this was coming. Holding nominations a year ahead of the campaign seems like it would have been difficult but we had 55 seats before the election and only 10 incumbent MPPs weren’t seeking re-election. Nominating candidates early enables them to build a team organically and raise their name recognition and profile. It also lets them raise money for their own campaign and for the party.

I am not totally anti-star candidate. I actually think the federal liberals strike a good balance on candidate selection. One star candidate I really like is Adam Van Koeverden. He was nominated many months before the federal elections and already has lots of name recognition but is working his gold-medal-winning-butt off to win in a tough riding.

While I think our candidate selection committee did a great job and I am grateful to the 124 awesome Ontarians who ran for the Liberals in 2008, the fact that the PCs under Brown started nominating their candidates so early and we didn’t adjust our timeline, negatively affected the party during the election.

Internalizing the politics and policies of austerity.

One of the weirdest flexes that our government repeatedly made was bragging about how Ontario has the lowest per-capita program spending of any of the provinces. If you feel asleep during the previous sentence, I won’t hold that against you. The only people who care are the former ministry of finance staffers who thought this was an effective argument in favour of our government.

The reason we made such an uncompelling argument as part of our daily messaging was that Liberals keep thinking that we can win against conservatives by arguinging on their terms and co-opting their failed economic policies. This means that the economy does worse than it would if we actually implemented the policies we campaigned on (with the government under-investing at times where there is almost no private sector spending.) This is compounded by the fact that we are already playing catchup on the economy when taking power from conservative governments. Those conservatives who cut taxes for the rich and starve the government of revenue and inflate the deficit and then use that as an excuse to gut government services.

As a government we spent years squeezing every single ministry, to get to a balanced budget. The problem? The vast majority of people who would even consider voting Liberal don’t care about the budget being balanced and even though no one who even when we do balance the budget, a large majority of Ontarians don’t believe us when we brag about it. The obsession with balancing the budget hurt us in traditional transactional politics by pissing off the stakeholders we needed to get on side (a 0% increase is a cut when you consider inflation) and lead to some big issues with doctors regularly protesting the government and a long waiting list for autism therapy services. The most unpopular policy decision made by the Kathleen Wynne government, the privatization of Hydro One, was done because the government bought into the conservative austerity argument that you can’t raise taxes or go into deficit for crucial infrastructure spending.

On the environment, centre-left politicians world-wide have rejected directly regulating the emissions of the handful of gigantic corporations who are literally destroying the planet. Instead, in a vain attempt to get approval from our right-wing opponents we embraced “market based” solutions to climate change, cap-and-trade and carbon taxes. Instead of supporting these policies, conservatives in Canada and the USA have shifted further and further to the right. This is referred to as “moving the Overton window.”

When President Obama first took office, blue dog Democrats and so-called moderate Republicans forced him to drastically cut stimulus spending (the Republicans still voted against the stimulus.) This meant that the economic recovery from the 2008 global economic crisis was slow and Democrats took the blame. Like President Obama, the Ontario Liberal’s embracing of austerity meant we lost enthusiasm from progressive activists. The same is true of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which initially began as a policy from a right-wing think tank which was implemented by a Republican governor in Massachusetts but is now called “socialism” by those on the right in the US,.

We keep chasing conservative voters even though we don’t need them. In the elections where we won majorities the Ontario PCs received: 34.6% (2003), 31.62% (2007), 35% (2014.) In 2011, when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were seat 1 short of a majority, the PCs received 35% of the vote. Doug Ford’s massive majority came with 40.5% of the vote. The conservatives will probably never get under 30% of the vote. That means there is 70% of the province that can be won over without embracing austerity.

Conservative economic policies are extremely unpopular. Why do you think conservatives campaign on lies and racial animus? To distract from their economic agenda which is stripping the government for parts to distribute our collective wealth to the rich. There are Liberals who seem to think that eventually conservatives will come to their senses if we just keep slashing the corporate tax rate or that the fever will break if we narrowly beat them in an election. When supposed moderate Christine Elliott first ran for the PC leadership, one of her policies was to freeze the minimum wage and she entertained the notion that rolling it back was a good idea. Dalton McGuinty raised the minimum wage 7 times and every single time the Ontario PCs opposed him. Under Kathleen Wynne the minimum wage got as high as $14 and hour and Ontario had its lowest unemployment rate in a generation.

A recent federal poll by Abacus Data showed that the top issues for conservatives were the deficit, securing the border and managing immigration. Canada doesn’t have a deficit problem, and there is no border crisis. These “issues” were made up by racist anti-immigrant activists and have now been embraced by Andrew Scheer and Doug Ford. In 2018 the Conservatives had no policy platform and ran entirely on lies, misdirection and complete refusal to commit to any concrete policy. However, people knew that a vote for the conservatives meant spending cuts. Conservatives want the debate to be about austerity and limited resource because this makes it so citizens expect less and less from their governments. Ontario is one of the richest jurisdictions in the world. We do not have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem. If Liberals run pretending to be conservatives, the 70% of the province who would vote for us will turn to the NDP and Greens and the people who want conservative policies will vote for the real thing.

When we embrace right wing ideas it demobilizes potential Liberals activists who supported us during the election when we promised progressive policies. Conservative policies also hurt the economy which means it is even more difficult to win the next election.

Completely ignoring populism.

I like Frank Graves’ definition of populism so that’s what I’m going to use: “The idea that there is a corrupt, power-holding elite of which the people — the public — are deeply suspicious, and the belief that power should be removed from the domain of the elite and restored to the people.”

Liberals pride ourselves on “supporting evidence-based policies” and “listening to experts.” Nowadays there is an inherent elitism in the DNA of Canadian Liberals. Just look at the way the OLP functions: a small group of party elites picks the leader and an even smaller group sets party policy. In the post Jack Layton federal scene, the NDP have largely shifted away from left-wing populism with a focus on electability (See: Andrea Horwath tying small business tax cuts to raising the minimum wage and Thomas Mulcair’s whole 2015 election campaign.) So unfortunately, many Canadians associated populism with the same old anti-government messaging that conservatives use to enact policies that benefit only rich corporations.

The 2008 global economic crisis rightfully damaged the reputation of global elites. While older, rural/suburban folks have developed an antipathy to experts, it is the younger, more urban Ontarians came of age with a healthy and appropriate skepticism of big businesses, the rich and capitalism itself.

While I understand why Liberals have a blindspot to populism, that doesn’t exclude how we ignored it and let Doug Ford, who is the son of a rich politician and who, like Donald Trump, is the definition of an elite, ride a wave of populism to victory.

It is especially egregious as there have been so many recent examples of populism globally, like the leave campaign winning the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Closer to home there was Rob Ford winning the Toronto mayoral race in 2010, Doug Ford receiving 330 610 votes in the 2014 Toronto mayoral race running against another conservative, Naheed Nenshi winning the 2010 Calgary mayoral race, Valérie Plante winning the 2017 Montreal Mayoral race, and Justin Trudeau winning the 2015 election with a pointed rejection of the elite consensus that all deficit spending is bad.

Not only did we Liberals ignore the populist energy percolating among the Ontario population, we also leaned in on the “elite” brand and refused to take up the populist mantle when given easy opportunities to do so. Having Ed Clark, the former CEO of TD Bank come in as a “privatization czar” right after the 2014 election where, again, we won campaigning against privatization and cuts, was not a good look.

On a number of occasions the government was presented with obvious villains, like the Nestle corporation who make huge profits by pumping out unfathomable gallons of Ontario’s delicious, clean water for what might as well be free. Instead of going after Nestle and making them pay their fair share we took forever to decide how to react and then gave them little more than a slap on the wrist.

You may ask: Does a progressive populism where the real elites (the rich elites who have profited massively while workers’ wage growth has been stagnant) actually work political when a Liberal embraces this kind of rhetoric and policy?

In January of 2018, Kathleen Wynne took on Tim Horton’s owners who were punishing their employees because the government raised the minimum wage. The economics is pretty clear on the minimum wage, it doesn’t kill jobs. It helps the poorest Ontarians AND the local economy as people who make the minimum wage spend their money locally. Ontario has a $14 minimum wage and the lowest unemployment in 40 years. So Premier Wynne was technically and morally correct. After this big public confrontation, Tim Horton’s reputation declined in the views of Ontarians and Kathleen Wynne’s popularity went up.

Folks on the left need to get better at storytelling and using emotional appeals to win over new supporters. When we cede the populism ground to those on the right, we are writing off voters who are rightfully frustrated and anxious. Like a stopped clock Doug Ford is occasionally correct. When he says that a group of elites is responsible for many of the problems that make life difficult from Ontarians across the province he is correct. However, it is the very people who bankroll and provide an intellectual superstructure for conservatism that are those elites, not hard working people in the Ontario public service.

Campaign finance rule changes.

My views on political fundraising are probably out of the mainstream. I don’t like restrictive ve limits on political donations. Specifically, I don’t think unions should be banned from donating to political parties. Union donations are a good counterweight to corporate influence which is exerted not only through donations but in corporate owned media, well funded think tanks and the fact that chambers of commerce usually hold local debates and can easily get media coverage of conservative ideas. The 2014 election campaign was held under the old campaign finance regime. The Liberals and PCs ran well funded campaigns and we had an important debate about the size of government and issues like climate change and retirement security were discussed. The 2018 campaign was an election about nothing. The only issue people remember is buck-a-beer.

While I totally understand why Premier Wynne changed Ontario’s campaign finance rules, the abruptness of the change and the loophole that the PCs exploited that allowed their nominated candidates to raise huge sums of money, contributed to the disastrous results of the 2018 election.

Not only had the Ontario Liberals become over-reliant on staff to run our campaigns after, we were completely dependent on corporate donations and people maxing out their donation limit. By drastically changing the whole system before actually building a donor base for our party, we bankrupted ourselves at a time where our government was unpopular. Our crappy fundraising totals was a symptom of the lack of an engaged activist class.

There are many models for small-dollar donor success. Justin Trudeau and the federal liberals have figured it out. Elizabeth Warren raised $19 million without holding a single corporate or big dollar fundraiser. What is the secret to success in both cases? Popular, populist policies and a leader who works hard to engage activists and bring them into their own party.

What was outside of our control:

1. We were in government for 15 years.
2. Internalizing the politics and policies of austerity…and the PCs still act and will always act like we haven’t.
3. On the CPP we were a victim of our own success.
4. The media is fundamentally conservative.
5. Homophobia/sexism.

We were in government for 15 years.

If you want to explain why we lost in one sentence, “we were in government for 15 years” is as succinct as it is accurate.

Governments have to make hard decision and over 15 years those decisions add up. The party in power makes a lot of enemies over a decade and a half.

Since the Ontario Liberals didn’t focus on constant party renewal over those 15 years, Ontarians viewed the government as the Liberals seeking a 5th term and not Kathleen Wynne seeking re-election.

Canada and Ontario both have far more competitive political environments than in the past. Gone are the days of the big blue machine governing for 30 year stretches or MacKenzie King being PM for 21 years.

Internalizing the politics and policies of austerity…and the PCs still act and will always act like we haven’t.

Though I do believe that modern conservatism is completely intellectually bankrupt, I do admit that in the past conservatives did have one or two compelling arguments. Unfortunately, centre-left and left wing parties have already incorporated the “good” parts of conservatism for decades now. Under 15 years of Liberal governance Ontario has the lowest per capita spending on government programs. We have an efficient government with little waste. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals repeatedly balanced the budget and went into deficit during the 2008 global financial crisis. Kathleen Wynne managed to balance the budget in 2017.

The bad news for Liberals is that instead of accepting reality, conservatives in Ontario have decided to lie to the people of Ontario.

During the campaign Doug Ford lied repeatedly about Ontario’s unemployment rate (which was the lowest it has been in 40 years when the Liberals left office) and the deficit, saying that the deficit was $15 billion. In May when the Ford government tabled their official estimates they agreed with the previous Liberal government, saying that the decific was on $3.7 billion. (Which, is almost has much money as the conservatives squandered by ending cap-and-trade in Ontario.) So, even though Liberals embraced the conservative view that we should obsessively balance the budget (something conservative governments literally never do) and that government should act like a business, the conservatives still campaign like we are profligate spenders.

Doug Ford’s PCs have gone even further in their abandonment of conservatives principles and in embracing the politics of fear and anger. A big part of conservatism used to be respect for institutions and a healthy skepticism of expanding state authority over personal liberties. Doug Ford’s first action as Premier was to scrap crucial police oversights that were passed by the previous government. He governs like he is the mayor of Toronto and has absolutely no respect for the free press. On the crucial issue of ensuring that children in Ontario have the knowledge and language to report child predators, Doug and the PCs sided against the police and with the predators when he campaigned against and then repealed the modern sex-ed curriculum to placate the homophobes who have a large voice in his party.

Conservatives no longer operate in good faith when debating and campaigning. When centre/centre left governments do embrace their meagre handful of good policy ideas from their side (see cap-and-trade and Obamacare as discussed above) conservatives simply reject their own policies for political advantage.

US Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said it best: “It’s time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say. It’s true that we embrace a far left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. Let’s stand up for the right policy, go up there and defend it.”

On the CPP we were a victim of our own success.

The other big piece of the Ontario Liberal platform in 2014 (besides vehemently opposing Tim Hudak’s 100 000 job cuts) was a commitment to create an Ontario Pension Plan. The fine print on the Ontario Pension Plan promise was that we wouldn’t go through with it if the federal government strengthened the Canada Pension Plan (something Stephen Harper was vehemently opposed to.) Mere months away from the 2019 federal election it is easy to forget that in 2014 the Federal Liberals had around 37 seats and was polling in third. So after the 2015 election, we were the victims of our own success. Kathleen Wynne managed to overcome the odds and win, then Justin Trudeau did the same, then KW managed the further impossible it getting all of the other Premiers to agree to strengthening the CPP. So instead of a popular new provincial government program that would benefit seniors in Ontario, we Ontario Liberals help people across the country retire with dignity and in the long term helped to reduce poverty among seniors (I wouldn’t trade this for the world.) This was a week-long positive story for Justin Trudeau. All we had was the $70 million worth of work we did setting up this massive program that members of the press called wasteful spending.

Strengthening the CPP is great policy. But we were victims of our own success in defeating Harper and implementing a policy for all Canadians which meant we traded away a big local accomplishment we could campaign on in 2018.

The media is fundamentally conservative.

Let me first say that I do not believe that the Canadian media is biased towards the Ontario PC party. However, I do believe that the media is philosophically biased towards small c conservatism.

The Queen’s Park press gallery has some of the hardest working people in Ontario among its ranks. They are an insightful, funny, kick-ass group of people who do crucial work holding governments accountable. However, they are still very male and very white. I remember attending the technical briefing put on by Minister Naqvi on the regulations to end carding and require police across Ontario to go through implicit bias training. Only a handful of journalists attended, they were all white dudes. The only questions they asked were about if the cost of ensuring that police officers are trained to help reduce structural racism among their ranks.

Journalists are all extremely high information individuals. Even the newest additions to the press gallery can easily rattle off lists of failures from previous governments. Since good news stories are boring, their collective memory tends to focuses negatively on what governments have done in the past. They also look on skeptically when governments propose new programs.

When reporters need quotes or reaction to stories, it is very easy to get them from the lobbyists who get hired by the rich and powerful to oppose strong, competent governments building an effective safety net. There are also many right-wing think tanks and groups like chambers of commerce who produce papers and hold events that promote a philosophically conservative point of view. In a world where the people who produce content for newspapers, television and the radio have to fill a certain number of column inches and segments, there is a large infrastructure dedicated to pushing conservative ideas in place who serve up content for journalists.

Talk radio is one area I believe Liberals have largely ignored and haven’t figured out how to engage with. A majority of talk radio hosts are extremely conservative. Since they have to fill hours and hours of air time they tend to repeat stories and take a hyper focus to small issues that amplifies them in the mind of the public. There is a feedback loop since the average caller is also very conservative.

The media economist also gets pulled to the right by the Sun Media. Like Fox News, there are some solid journalists doing great work writing for the Sun. But they also let Rex Murphy (in the National Post) and Lorrie Goldstein (in the Toronto Sun) write the exact same article denying the science of climate change, every week. The Sun regularly takes ludicrous ideas and normalizes them by publishing them and having their reporters ask politicians about them during their press conferences that are being broadcast on mainstream networks. Post Media has also purchased a whole bunch of local newspapers which means anti-government, anti-science, anti-immigrant and anti-feminist opinion pieces get circulated around the province.

If you visit the Canadian news aggregator NationalNewsWatch as much as I do (you don’t, I go there a lot) you can’t help but notice just how white and male the Canadain political punditocracy is. This is bad not just liberals and progressive but for the whole country. The majority of our political writers have largely benefited from structural racism and misogyny and are blind to issues facing more than half of the population.

One area where I envy conservatives is their success in taking advantage of the both sides fallacy (which has been woven into the DNA of modern journalism) to effectively work the refs. The reality is, Canadian media is way more conservative than the country as a whole. Just look at which federal party receives the lion’s share of endorsement each election. But conservatives regularly attack the media as biased against them so journalists routinely overcorrect in order to not appear biased.

Thankfully, in the era of social media there are more ways than ever to speak directly to voters. Unfortunately Liberals have prioritize the wrong part of the air war and have largely ignored online advertising’s potential.

Homophobia/sexism.

Kathleen Wynne was Ontario’s first female premier. She was also the first out queer head of government in the English speaking world.

Part of the reason Kathleen Wynne didn’t win re-election is the misogyny that is part of the very fabric of our society. My friend Kate Graham has a whole podcast series called “No Second Chances” where she explores the fact that none of the 12 women who have served as first ministers (Premiers and Prime Minister) across Canada have won re-election.

While I wish that Martin Luther King Jr was correct when he said that “the arc of history bends toward justice” we appear to be in a moment of back-sliding. Hate crimes have been increasing in Canada and the United States, women’s health choices have been rolled back in many US states and the number of Canadian politicians who are vehemently anti-choice has risen. Tanya Granic Allen, an outspoken homophobe, received 14.5% in the most recent Ontario PC Party leadership and her support helped secure the leadership for Doug Ford.

As I write this there are no women serving as Premier of any of Canada’s provinces or territories.

While I am not an expert in the subject, I wanted to note that misogyny and homophobia played a role in the scale of Premier Wynne’s loss. While there have been incremental gains for women and queer people in society, the patriarchy is still very strong.

Where do we go from here?

Despite what the 7000+ words I wrote above say, I am full of hope.

Here is why:

• Over 1000s delegates showed up for the 2019 Ontario Liberal AGM (We still need to do way better in the North and Southwest.) This was the best attended AGM I have ever been to.
• 60% of Ontarians polled barely halfway into the Doug Ford patronage corruption scandal said they believed that Doug Ford was corrupt.
• All of the current candidates for our next leader are under 50 years old (Steven De Duca, Michael Coteau and Alvin Tedjo) and the people often mentioned as potential candidates (Kate Graham, Mitzie Hunter, Nate Erskine-Smith) are also under 50. The party needs generational change and the next leader will embody that change.
• After the next leader is chosen the party will be holding a real, open policy convention.

Politics isn’t a game. Doug Ford’s cuts mean more people suffering from addiction will die in the opioid crisis. The suicide rate for trans Ontarians is incredibly high and we have a government that just doesn’t care and repealed a sex-ed curriculum that prepared teachers to answer questions from queer and trans students. Climate change is literally going to make the earth uninhabitable and Ontario’s government is actively encouraging polluters to make things worse.

I became an activist because my Mom was a nurse who lost her job in the Mike Harris health care cuts and my Dad was a teacher who was on strike during the PC war on teachers. It is no consolation to me that Doug Ford’s chaos, cuts and corruption will inspire a new generation of activists.

There is an immense amount of activist energy out in Ontario right now. The Ontario Liberal Party needs to re-think almost everything about how our party structures itself and how we act between, during and after elections.

If you read all this and you disagree with me, that’s okay. If you think I was personally criticizing your actions over the last 15 years, I was not. I honestly don’t think our loss can be attributed to malicious actions from a handful of specific people. If you have better ideas than mine to helping develop a permanent class of Liberal activists I am all ears and I’d love to help you.

If the Ontario Liberals want to rebuild, thrive, and have any chance at forming government in 4 or 8 years we need a hard working, charismatic leader running on a bold, progressive platform. That leader can’t be afraid to make an emotional, populist appeal and take on the rich, corporate elites.