Listen Up! Next election could give us yet another Liberal government in Ontario – Opinion

Hugh Mackenzie
Huntsville Doppler

Can the Liberals be re-elected in Ontario?

It looks very much to me like we will have a Liberal government in Ontario after the next election and that doesn’t warm the cockles of my heart. Impossible you say? After all Kathleen Wynne is at a record breaking low approval rating of only 13 per cent. But yes, it is possible and in my view, at this point in time, even probable. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

The Ontario Liberal Party is a master at survival. Kathleen Wynne may or may not be the Leader when the current government faces the next election. My guess is that she won’t be, because she is seen to carry too much baggage. The incredible mismanagement of Hydro and the resulting sky rocketing cost to taxpayers are the big issue of course, but there are many more matters in which her government has failed, including winning the prize for Ontario achieving the highest debt of any sub-government in the entire world. We are effectively broke. While it may bring comfort to some to blame others, the fact is, it happened under Wynne’s watch, aided and abetted by a previous decade of the Liberal government under Dalton McGuinty.

Pragmatism is the root of politics. You can be a hero one day and a road block to re-election the next. Premier Wynne insists that she will lead her party into the next election and maybe she will. We won’t know until the hour she announces her resignation. But even though the entire Liberal caucus, Cabinet members and “yes Ma’am” backbenchers alike, are responsible for the current mess this Province is in, the Premier will wear it. If it continues to look like the Liberals will lose the 2018 election, then Kathleen Wynn will be shown the door. Plain and simple. Even the left-wing Toronto Star is acknowledging that the writing is on the wall.

Of course, if Wynne is gone, there will be a search for a new leader; a new face for the Liberal Party of Ontario. The hope of course is that the baggage will go out the door with the former Premier. It shouldn’t, because the baggage is the legacy of 15 years of Liberal rule. But it could. It happened with Dalton McGuinty. After 10 years as Premier, people were ready to throw his government out, especially in light of the $1.1 billion gas plant scandal. But as soon as he was gone and there was a new face for the Liberals, Bingo! All was forgotten, even as the policies remained generally the same. A new face but the same old body.

My guess is that the new Liberal Leader, if there is one, will not be one of the front benchers on the Government side of the Legislature, who are quietly frothing at the mouth for Kathleen Wynne’s job. It would not surprise me to see the re-emergence of Sandra Pupatello, a former MPP from Windsor who was a prominent Cabinet Minister in the McGuinty Government. She ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party, lost to Kathleen Wynne and quit politics sometime afterward. She does not wear any of the current government’s mistakes, although she played a significant role in the previous one. She was generally liked and seen to be smart, feisty and effective. If Sandra Pupatello leaves the private sector, where she has also been successful and seeks the Liberal leadership, she would be a formidable candidate to those who run against her and if she won, a daunting challenge to any other political party.

But a new leader alone will not assure that the Ontario Liberals win the next election. For them to win, they need someone on the other side of the floor who allows that to happen. And in plain truth, as painful as it might be, that person may be the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, Patrick Brown.

Current polling shows that if an election were held today, Patrick Brown and his Progressive Conservatives would win a majority government. But that is because at this moment in time there is an ‘anybody but Wynne’ phenomena sweeping the Province and nobody should fool themselves otherwise. It has little to do with who Brown is. In fact, many people don’t know who he is. The previous Tory leader, Tim Hudak, has more public recognition today, than does Patrick Brown after two years on the job. Many of those who do know who he is, are concerned about his flip flops on key issues and his apparent lack of ‘royal jelly’. I count myself among those. He just doesn’t come across as a Premier, at least, not yet. If the Liberals come up with a dynamic new leader, many people in Ontario would then be prone, as history has shown, to forgive and forget. Support for Patrick Brown could slip away like ice on the lake in April.

Conservatives are generally more kind than Liberals when it comes to dumping their leaders. They tend to wait until after they have lost an election. I understand that. But unless the movers and shakers in the Tory Party find a way to visibly develop Patrick Brown as a real and effective alternative, not to Kathleen Wynne, but to the current Liberal dynasty, the next election will be a hat trick for the Grits. So far, I have seen little to suggest that Brown is up to that task.

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