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Ontario’s Liberals fear getting swept away by the same whirlwind that carried Donald Trump to the White House, with the worst gusts coming from high electricity prices.
They know they’re unpopular. They have believed that their well-intended efforts to look beyond short-term political advantage will start paying off in time to win re-election in 2018. And now they look at Hillary Clinton and they wonder.
They gathered at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa this weekend for their annual convention to talk about the danger they’re in. They saved Madeleine Meilleur’s old seat in Ottawa-Vanier in this past week’s byelection, which is a relief, but they got pantsed by a teenage Tory in Niagara West-Glanbrook and their provincewide poll numbers are terrible.
“We’re going into redoubling mode at this moment,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said in an onstage chat Saturday morning with Mary Kay Henry, the president of the two-million-member U.S.-based Service Employees International Union, on Saturday morning.
They have a message — that they’re preparing Ontario for the economy of the future — but they have to sell it now.
Henry sees Ontario as a beacon for progressive policies that are good for people like her nurses, public-service workers and cleaners. She and her union worked their tails off for Clinton and it didn’t work.
“We’re still trying to unpack what happened,” Henry said, Particularly in industrial states like Michigan (where Henry is from), Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which have been solid Democratic Party territory but which Clinton lost to Trump on Nov. 8. The union’s own numbers suggest that a fifth of its members voted Trump, a sign that its message that Trump has no real industry or jobs plan simply did not penetrate.
Henry talked about Obamacare, the U.S. federal health-care law that has provided health insurance to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans … but also driven up premiums for millions of others who had insurance already. Obamacare has flaws forced into by the complicated political horsetrading it took to get anything passed by Congress, loopholes related to drug costs, any number of other quirks.
“That’s all way too complicated for the person that got their premium cheque increased,” Henry acknowledged. A price hike is a price hike.
In Ontario, “read ‘electricity rates’,” Wynne replied ruefully. “Complicated. Hard to explain.” She thought for a moment. “Needs to be fixed.”
Trump’s win is not just a sign of trouble for the Liberals; it could be a problem in itself. Ontario’s efforts to expand trade, to expand green energy, to attract high-wage employers with government help could be the right long-term policies but be damaging if the Americans go in the opposite direction. They’ll be working with governors of Great Lakes states to try to impress on the new administration how important the cross-border relationship is to U.S. prosperity.
Wynne will go on a listening tour of every riding in Ontario before the next election, she announced, and she wants Ontarians to grill her.
“I have some work to do — to prove that I am who I have always been, and that I will always work as hard as I can to do what is right for our province and what is in the best interests of the people of Ontario,” she said in a speech after the Henry talk. She’ll be starting with electricity prices.
“People have told me that they’ve had to choose between paying their electricity bill and buying food or paying the rent. That is unacceptable to me,” she said. “Our government made a mistake. It was my mistake. And I’m going to do my best to fix it.”
In the past, governments spooked by hydro prices have always resorted to short-term moves that often make no long-term sense, either freezing prices while the system decays or covering shortfalls out of the provincial treasury. On how she’ll do what she says she’ll do, Wynne had no specifics. But promised that those will come.
The Liberals here do have an advantage over the Progressive Conservatives: party unity. The Tories have to run against the Liberals together in a way Republicans didn’t absolutely have to hew to everything Donald Trump said as he ran for president.
The Tories have always been an unwieldy coalition of small-government libertarians who don’t care whom you have sex with, social conservatives who very much do, and rural populists who are OK with government activism as long as it means things like new highways.
In last week’s two byelections, they gained a homeschooled teenager in one riding and failed to elect a deeply experienced former provincial ombudsman in another.
Just about the only thing Niagara winner Sam Oosterhoff and Ottawa loser André Marin had in common besides a party banner was a belief that electricity prices are too high. Guys like Oosterhoff are “a threat to the party,” Marin says, poison to the Tories’ chances in urban ridings they have to win. Liberals in Ottawa gleefully shared that around here on the weekend.
Say what you like about Kathleen Wynne’s “activist centrism,” the idea that the government should aim to help everyone in their daily lives. It’s expensive, it’s intrusive, it’s ineptly applied, it’s dreamed up by people who get anxious when they’re out of sight of the CN Tower. OK. It is at least a coherent vision of what government is for and Wynne doesn’t have to sell it to her fellow Liberals.
She’ll take any advantage she can get.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
They know they’re unpopular. They have believed that their well-intended efforts to look beyond short-term political advantage will start paying off in time to win re-election in 2018. And now they look at Hillary Clinton and they wonder.
They gathered at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa this weekend for their annual convention to talk about the danger they’re in. They saved Madeleine Meilleur’s old seat in Ottawa-Vanier in this past week’s byelection, which is a relief, but they got pantsed by a teenage Tory in Niagara West-Glanbrook and their provincewide poll numbers are terrible.
“We’re going into redoubling mode at this moment,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said in an onstage chat Saturday morning with Mary Kay Henry, the president of the two-million-member U.S.-based Service Employees International Union, on Saturday morning.
They have a message — that they’re preparing Ontario for the economy of the future — but they have to sell it now.
Henry sees Ontario as a beacon for progressive policies that are good for people like her nurses, public-service workers and cleaners. She and her union worked their tails off for Clinton and it didn’t work.
“We’re still trying to unpack what happened,” Henry said, Particularly in industrial states like Michigan (where Henry is from), Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which have been solid Democratic Party territory but which Clinton lost to Trump on Nov. 8. The union’s own numbers suggest that a fifth of its members voted Trump, a sign that its message that Trump has no real industry or jobs plan simply did not penetrate.
Henry talked about Obamacare, the U.S. federal health-care law that has provided health insurance to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans … but also driven up premiums for millions of others who had insurance already. Obamacare has flaws forced into by the complicated political horsetrading it took to get anything passed by Congress, loopholes related to drug costs, any number of other quirks.
“That’s all way too complicated for the person that got their premium cheque increased,” Henry acknowledged. A price hike is a price hike.
In Ontario, “read ‘electricity rates’,” Wynne replied ruefully. “Complicated. Hard to explain.” She thought for a moment. “Needs to be fixed.”
Trump’s win is not just a sign of trouble for the Liberals; it could be a problem in itself. Ontario’s efforts to expand trade, to expand green energy, to attract high-wage employers with government help could be the right long-term policies but be damaging if the Americans go in the opposite direction. They’ll be working with governors of Great Lakes states to try to impress on the new administration how important the cross-border relationship is to U.S. prosperity.
Wynne will go on a listening tour of every riding in Ontario before the next election, she announced, and she wants Ontarians to grill her.
“I have some work to do — to prove that I am who I have always been, and that I will always work as hard as I can to do what is right for our province and what is in the best interests of the people of Ontario,” she said in a speech after the Henry talk. She’ll be starting with electricity prices.
“People have told me that they’ve had to choose between paying their electricity bill and buying food or paying the rent. That is unacceptable to me,” she said. “Our government made a mistake. It was my mistake. And I’m going to do my best to fix it.”
In the past, governments spooked by hydro prices have always resorted to short-term moves that often make no long-term sense, either freezing prices while the system decays or covering shortfalls out of the provincial treasury. On how she’ll do what she says she’ll do, Wynne had no specifics. But promised that those will come.
The Liberals here do have an advantage over the Progressive Conservatives: party unity. The Tories have to run against the Liberals together in a way Republicans didn’t absolutely have to hew to everything Donald Trump said as he ran for president.
The Tories have always been an unwieldy coalition of small-government libertarians who don’t care whom you have sex with, social conservatives who very much do, and rural populists who are OK with government activism as long as it means things like new highways.
In last week’s two byelections, they gained a homeschooled teenager in one riding and failed to elect a deeply experienced former provincial ombudsman in another.
Just about the only thing Niagara winner Sam Oosterhoff and Ottawa loser André Marin had in common besides a party banner was a belief that electricity prices are too high. Guys like Oosterhoff are “a threat to the party,” Marin says, poison to the Tories’ chances in urban ridings they have to win. Liberals in Ottawa gleefully shared that around here on the weekend.
Say what you like about Kathleen Wynne’s “activist centrism,” the idea that the government should aim to help everyone in their daily lives. It’s expensive, it’s intrusive, it’s ineptly applied, it’s dreamed up by people who get anxious when they’re out of sight of the CN Tower. OK. It is at least a coherent vision of what government is for and Wynne doesn’t have to sell it to her fellow Liberals.
She’ll take any advantage she can get.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
