None of this is a surprise. Few of those involved are people we didn’t expect to be there. Some of the discussion has landed on coffee row or around the water cooler, but not a lot of it. None of the colours, the logos, the slogans or the rhetoric has caught us off guard. We even knew exactly when it was coming from as long as four years ago. Now it’s time for us to digest, assess and join the most important, but least acknowledged activity of our democracy – electing the right politician to represent us.
“Politics (is) the noblest of all callings,” wrote British journalist, Goldwin Smith, “but the meanest of all trades.”
Just ask John Tory, who spent much of Monday eating crow. As noble as his “inclusive” intentions appeared – to extend public funding to Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Hindu and other religious schools – he had to change his mind. With the governing Liberals up to 10 points ahead of his Conservatives in the polls and the issue consuming his party’s policy platform, Tory decided to stop the bleeding and instead of demanding caucus solidarity, announced a free vote on faith-based funding, if elected.
His reaction reminded me of another Ontario politician’s thoughts. “A politician … has to sit on a fence and still keep both ears to the ground,” said Allan Lamport, one-time mayor of Toronto.
To be perfectly fair, my sense is that Howard Hampton, leader of the New Democrats, has had a tough sell for his campaign plank to raise Ontario’s minimum wage to $10, immediately. Even when the hourly rate was adjusted up to $8 some months ago, the outrage among some business and retail groups nearly drowned out any of the perceived benefits to workers across the province. Each leader has been equally vulnerable.
Consider Dalton McGuinty’s promissory record – on taxation, elimination of coal-fired generating plants and hospital procedure waiting times. Any of these could easily have been McGuinty’s faith-based funding debacle, were the situation reversed. Like most incumbent politicians, the premier has played this election campaign pretty close to the vest, this time announcing new policies strategically close to Oct. 10, such as transportation grants, funding to colleges and universities and even a new holiday in February.
I’m reminded of another quotable quote: “A candidate is a person who stands for what he thinks the public will fall for,” said Al Boliska, long-ago Toronto radio host and funny man.
The Greens have emerged from their single-issue world – preserving the environment – to engage the wider Ontario agenda this election. Indeed, among the Green proposals on the education front would be the total elimination of all faith-based funding, including public tax money to the Separate Catholic school system. Had the leader of the Greens, Frank De Jong, won a chair for the televised debate, that stance might well have risen to the top of the public’s consciousness. Not necessarily to the party’s benefit.
“Intellectuals in large numbers will sink the raft of any party,” wrote Canadian economist and historian Harold Innis, “and if allowed to write a program will kill it.”
There is one aspect to this campaign I find intriguing, however. It’s the discussion around the referendum on which we’ll also cast votes come election day. Along with your slate of candidates, Oct. 10, you and I will be asked to vote for or against “mixed member proportional representation.”
Under an MMP Ontario legislative system, Queen’s Park would operate with 129 seats, not the current 107. In the next election, conceivably in 2011, up to 90 of those seats would be filled by politicians gaining the most votes in each riding – the so-called first-past-the-post system we’ve had all along. The remaining seats would be awarded on a party basis, that is, based on the proportion of ballots earned by each political party. The minimum number of votes required for a party to receive an MMP seat would be 3 per cent of the popular vote.
The benefits, say MMP proponents, would bring a wider spectrum of voices to the Legislature, better reflecting more views than just the traditional big three parties. The downside, say MMP opponents, would be legislative chaos.
Which brings me to a final political quote from former Canadian prime minister and Nobel prize laureate Lester B. Pearson: “Politics,” he said, “is the skilled use of blunt objects.”
