The PCs of Ford and Lecce have lost the room, is the Legislature to follow? Best Case Ontario
Doctors, public health units and much of the populace are in revolt against a party and Ontario premier whose vaccine strategy is revolting — and they look beatable in the 2022 Ontario election.
Best Case Ontario will be a catchall for my halfwitted social commentary. Hoping is better for coping than moping. More sports in a bit.
A politician who has been tuned out does not necessarily get voted out. It is becoming clear that Ontario’s government for the property brokers, fronted by failson of a premier Doug Ford and minister of education Stephen Lecce, have lost the room.
In sports, that means players have stopped listening to their coach and dropped all professional deference. A letter signed by 150 intensive care physicians telling the premier “we are being led down a very dangerous path by using ICU capacity as a benchmark for tolerance of COVID-19 spread,” is not necessarily a proof the tuning out hit critical mass. And vexations on Twitter are also not a proof. Who is not vexed on Twitter? But there are signs of active resistance in a region that tends toward anglo Canadian complacency.
Over the holiday weekend, the feeds of friends who had been rolling with the pandemic’s punche were full of anger. The “emergency brake” measures are actually less restrictive than the last ones, even though Ontario has over 25,000 active COVID19 cases for the first time in nine months. The legacy media and municipal politicians are asking pointed questions about, for instance, why a pharmacy-based vaccination program largely skips “heavily-populated and high-risk neighbourhoods” in Hamilton and Ottawa, the two largest cities outside of Toronto that have few Progressive Conservative legislators.
It is just one part of the plan, but how the pharmacies were chosen should raise a Spockian eyebrow. Kingston, Ont., which is a COVID “success story,” had more pharmacies selected for the vax program than Ottawa, even though its public health unit has the second-lowest positivity rate in Ontario and about one-seventh of the population of Ottawa. That is contributing to Ontario is being nowhere close to the number of vaccinations it needs to perform daily to stay ahead of the variants. And that’s before one contemplates if we are even vaccinating the most-at-risk people, or just the ones who are easiest to vaccinate.
The latest is that the government is “moving into Phase 2.” It has not completed Phase One. To quote George Costanza, they’re step-skippers! And Phase 2 is only moving ahead by two weeks.
That too-little, too-late move came after a very bad weekend for the Ford Gang. As late as Monday morning, Lecce, who had insisted that “schools would remain open” was doing his best Chip Diller in Animal House — remain calm!! All is well!! — by affirming that 99 per cent of public schools are still open.
Meantime, public health boards across the province were ordering schools to go online-only. Children should be in school in any area where the caseload is fewer than 80 per 100,000 population, but not with what was called “a weak plan” three months ago by people eminently qualified to make those evaluations. The juxtaposition can be read like a stop sign:
Circling back to the vaccine strategy for a second, there are credible claims of “systemic racism manifesting in the policy process.” Ultimately, people whom one would expect to stay neutral, like the Toronto Maple Leafs public address announcer, have had it with the Ontario government:
I fear losing the room just with that summary.
Tuning out is most the mentally healthful move to help avoid “rapid-cycling between grief and rage … (while) experiencing widespread and collective trauma.” You no longer need to see modelling. You just want to know when you can do everyday things again — and when you can vote.
Does that anger at the party lead to losing power in Ontario’s next election in June 2022? Polling states that the Ford-led PCs would win another majority if the election was held now. There is a portion of the electorate who view a change in government as an unnecessary multiplier. (Of course, that means not addressing the multiplier called a War of Science.)
Sometimes it’s good to sit in third
Like a river that doesn’t know where it’s flowing, voter anger can take a wrong turn and just keep going.
It is anyone’s guess whether righteous anger will go more to the opposition New Democrats of leader Andrea Horwath, or the Ontario Liberals of leader Stephen DelDuca. The NDP hold 40 seats and the Liberals have eight in the 124-seat legislature after being nearly wiped off the electoral map in 2018.1
I will say it; the NDP is typically a placeholder party for likely Liberal votes in Ontario; NDP strategists acknowledge that red is a stronger brand than orange. Their 40-seat NDP showing was their best result since an upset win in 1990 that required own-goals by both of the other two parties. But one has to hold space for the idea that the pandemic might spur a culture change that would create more NDP voters.
The Liberals are never out in the wilderness for very long with Ontario voters. The best example is at the federal level with the 2011 and ’15 elections. The federal LPC collapsed to 11 Ontario members of Parliament in 2011. Four years later, it bounced back to 80 Ontario MPs, winning nearly two-thirds of the seats by the margin of a 20-percentage-point jump in popular support (taking about 10 each from the NDP and Conservatives).
Being the third party at Queen’s Park being somewhat free of the often-thankless job of telling the governing party about how it sucks at their job. Horwath is doing the dirty work there, but it also means that she is before the public when the premier goes to his plastic hardman playbook and personalizes a professional critique in order to make himself seem like a victim. That still plays well with some men who believe they’re victims because they are answerable to a woman at their work.
I am simply invested in seeing the current party voted out, since (engage sarcasm font) criminal negligence is one of my deal-breakers.
A pore through 2018 riding results shows there are 16 ridings that the PCPO won by a margin over the runner-up that was less than margin that the combined second- and third-place tally exceeded the PC total.
Ottawa West-Nepean. Jeremy Roberts had the lowest support of any MPP in Ontario, getting 32.8 to win by a margin of 0.3. Nearly twice as many voters (61.8) supported the other two parties.
Brantford-Brant. Will Bouma had a 1.1 winning margin, but just over half the riding’s voters voted NDP or Liberal. The riding had the fourth-lowest turnout.
Brampton West. Amarjot Sandhu also won by 1.3 per cent in a low-turnout riding (113th of 124). Nearly 57% of votes went to the other two parties.
Peterborough-Kawartha. Three of the PCPO’s tight wins came in ridings with a top-10 turnout, including this one with a 3.9 winning margin and 37.7 support.
Cambridge. Belinda Karahalios had a 5.5 winning margin from the third-highest turnout in the province. She has since quit the PCPO to form her own party.
Mississauga-Malton. Deepak Anand had a 6.3 winning margin, but the turnout was the sixth-worst in Ontario. The combined Liberal/NDP support was 14.5 percentage points greater than his winning tally (53.6 to 39.1).
Ten other tight ridings are Ajax, Brampton South, Eglington-Lawrence, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Etobicoke Centre, Kitchener-Conestoga, Kitchener South-Hespeler, Oakville, Sault Ste. Marie and Scarborough-Rouge Park.
There is a cycle when it comes to realizing one was hornswoggled by a retail politician. It is hard to admit, at first, that you fell for a slick sales pitch. But people turn to anger. That was how it went down in the Incited States with that guy Doug Ford likes. They kept holding out hope he would grow into the job. At that moment, he became president became a meme for a reason.
The excrement hit the aerofoil device after people understood how they had been played. It has sort of played out much the same way with Ford, especially in the early months of the pandemic, when he recovered from being underwater in polling.
Don’t attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence
The PCPO spin on Ontario’s vaccination levels is that the supply chain looks how it should look. They are moving in a way that means not getting caught with bare shelves. However, COVID19 vaccines that have been approved by Health Canada and delivered by the federal government are (cue the Sam Kinison decibel levels) not the same as a popular flavour of Gatorade on the first humid weekend of the spring.
This is written in full hope that Ontario takes a big leap to vaccinating 125,000 people per day by Wednesday. Apologists like to accuse shitty Gliberals like me of rooting for Doug Ford to fail, but that is the difference between hope and optimism. One should hope it works out regardless of the party in power. It is hard to be optimistic when presented with snapshots of how vaccination is going in three different cities — Kingston, Ottawa and Hamilton — where I have lived.
I do not, full stop, believe the PCs are so mendacious that they would try to get people in their key voter demographics vaccinated first. One can definitely wonder at how the choices were made with a pharmacy vaccination program. First we need a reminder about positivity rates in each of Ontario’s 34 public health units:
The Kingston-area public health unit2 takes in an urban riding repped by rising NDP star Ian Arthur, and parts of two rural ridings. It is bizarre that Kingston was a higher priority than Peel.
That is, until you hear the PCPO explanation for how it chose the pharmacies. Last weekend, Postmedia’s Ottawa vertical reported that Ottawa had 34 locations selected for pharmacy-based vaccination.
Alexandra Hilkene, spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott, said participation and performance in this year’s flu shot program, “as well as capacity and readiness for vaccinations, have been part of the criteria of selection to onboard the pharmacies.” (Postmedia, April 3)
Question: Who gets a flu shot? Older people, more educated people, people who head south over the holidays, and habitual rule-followers. I cannot say definitively if that skews more toward subarbanites in PCPO-held ridings.
But using flu shot rates seems foolish. Remember, while Ford was Premier Dadding last fall about how “it’s never been more important” to get a flu shot, the province only ordered one-third more doses than it usually does. Sure enough, signs soon appeared in pharmacies that they were out of flu shots. I would also suspect that lower-income people are more likely to opt out of getting one if there are shortages.
The plan created major barriers for people in high-risk neighbourhoods to get vaccinated. Ottawa Centre, a NDP stronghold, got one location.
Hamilton’s lower city, is having a similar experience. Elected officials at all three levels are wondering why lower-city pharamacies did not get vaccines. Also,
Calling this social engineering could alienate moderates any party will need to win enough votes to form government. So it is not social engineering; it just climbs into a cross-over utility vehicle and drives to the pharmacy in a big-box store plaza like one.
It is getting too late in the post to bring up anything new, but a Torstar/National Observer report over who stands to benefit from an ill-conceived Highway 413 plan could potentially further stoke anger. Across Southern Ontario, there have been an emergence of citizen committees that have good intent with trying to persuade the powerful to pump the brakes on building more environmentally unfriendly highways and sprawling suburbs. It is more likely to be a winning issue for the NDP or iIberals than the PCPO.
The buck always stops somewhere, fairly or not. I hope this post fosters some hope it will stop with the party that promised buck-a-beer come June 2022.
The OLP won seven seats, and has since gained a member who crossed the floor.
Full disclosure, my parents, born in 1952, are serviced by the KFLA PHU.
And now I can't get Kinisons "ohh oohhh" out of my head. Lol.
lol wow do i ever disagree with a lot of this!
From bottom to top:
1. no, I *definitely* do not think building sprawl housing is a losing issue for the Tories. Quite the opposite. This is what the electorate very, very much wants. Building more housing is a core public concern and wasteful sprawl housing is very much Ontario's favourite kind, by a long long way.
2. while i suspect that pandemic scale-tipping like the uneven vaccine rollout is likely to motivate poor voters, if they weren't alredy motivated (they aren't)... it's not likely to be unpopular with liberals or to disaffect any Tory voters. liberals especially Liberals very much believe in punishing those people with policy choices wherever possible. (I wholeheartedly agree that using flu-shot stats was dumb as public health, but it was very smart in targeting vaccines to the people most likely to complain about not being in front of the line)
3. incidentally, the disquiet over our shockingly cack-handed vaccine rollout (trollout?) will disappear as wealthy people grab their doses over the spring. there won;t be any memory of this by mid-summer, even though actual infection numbers will still be comparatively bad.
4. Liberals were out of favour with Ontario voters for *four entire decades* partly within my lifetime. Do not underestimate the degree to which voters can simply sideline any party.
5. Ford did not hornswoggle anyone. He has governed as he essentially promised to: as a doctrinaire conservative with a cruel streak, and a mandate to put the former government and its people In Their Place. He won a Resentment Election and has governed with a Resentment Government. (and in fact, he's been less capricious and cruel than one would have anticipated, knowing Doug Ford as one does). There is not really a Tory vote bloc that had any illusions, especially policy-based ones, about Ford and his government. And yes, this is why their polling vote remains extremely solid, and why there have been very few unfaithful Tories in those polls. No one is digesting much if any of Ford's 38-42%. Someone's gonna have to beat it.
6. As for vaccinations being a spoil of government, and governments trying to vaccinate their demographic first... I think everyone everywhere agrees that older people are by far and away the most important demographic to vaccinate, and I think we can agree that older people are by far and away the Tories' strongest demographic. So I don't know how you'd separate cynical politics from good policy on this front.