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The wheels aren’t off the Doug Ford campaign to be premier of Ontario, but they’re wobbling something fierce.
The Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats are neck-and-neck, according to three separate recent polls. The Tories are destroying the Liberals, which was what Ford was put into his party’s leadership to do. But they’re now having to resist attacks from an unexpected direction.
On Thursday, the still-kicking Liberals shared detailed allegations that Ford himself broke party rules in 2016 by helping an Etobicoke candidate he favoured sign up bogus members. Allegations supported by affidavits from the time, sworn by an aggrieved rival candidate and her campaign workers. And an audio recording of Ford himself, sounding very much like he’s promising to pay for people’s Tory party memberships if they’ll just sign this paper here, please.
Ford said it’s all guff, investigated by the Tories long before Patrick Brown flamed out and Ford took over, and found to be groundless. But one of the first things Ford did as Tory leader was to overturn a batch of nominations that had been challenged but upheld under Brown. Ford himself doesn’t believe the party’s investigations from around then were reliable.
I mean, they obviously weren’t: the very same committee said Brown could run for party leader again, then disqualified him as a local candidate after he dropped out. Kangaroo courts have higher standards than that. Even actual kangaroos probably do.
In the same way as the Liberals’ Sudbury nomination mess revealed Kathleen Wynne to be not that different from other politicians in some important ways, the new Tory nomination scandal implicates Ford in Brown-era messes.
He was always a high-risk choice for the Progressive Conservative party. A populist who was eager to ditch Brown’s years of work crafting a centrist platform that voters would like. Not a refined politician. Just good folks, speaking the truths that the Tory rank and file has been desperate to hear talked up loud and proud. But clumsy sometimes, shrugging off detail, weirdly unfamiliar with even basics about how the provincial government works. Like how a law gets passed.
These qualities can be passed off as charms when things are going well. Turns out that in other circumstances, they’re actually the weaknesses they appear to be.
Ford himself has been sticking mostly to Tory-friendly greater Toronto lately: Tillsonburg (Tory-held), Brantford (Liberal Dave Levac is retiring) and Hamilton (solidly New Democrat downtown but with Liberals likely in trouble in the suburbs) on Thursday.
So far, Ford’s been to Ottawa once this campaign, and that was for a meet-and-greet at a pub in Carp on a weekday afternoon before he left for Renfrew. It’s scant attention to the eastern end of Ontario.
Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak held a media session in Orléans in 2014 to amend his earlier refusal to fund a second phase of light-rail construction in Ottawa.
In 2014, Tory leader Tim Hudak made multiple trips to Ottawa. Five by my count, though one was to take back stuff he’d said on a previous trip about Ontario’s being too broke to fund extensions of the light-rail system. He released major platform planks here, including the details of his Million Jobs Plan. He had candidates with honest shots in Ottawa West-Nepean and Ottawa-Orléans especially. Their odds are even stronger this time, but Tory candidates aren’t getting the same backing from the centre.
NDP leader Andrea Horwath received a raucous welcome from NDP supporters at candidate Jennifer McKenzie’s headquarters in downtown Ottawa in 2014.
The New Democrats’ Andrea Horwath came here one time in 2014, for a quick walk through a Montreal Road café and a bit of handshaking on Somerset Street. The NDP had no realistic hopes in Ottawa and her visit was just enough to inoculate them against the charge they didn’t care about us at all. Horwath’s made one visit here so far in 2018, for a quick speech in the middle of the Victoria Day weekend. It’s not much.
2018 Liberal candidates, from left: Stephanie Maghnam (Kanata-Carleton), Yasir Naqvi (Ottawa Centre), Bob Chiarelli (Ottawa West-Nepean) and John Fraser (Ottawa South) chat with the Prince of Wales Bridge in the background.
Kathleen Wynne has been to Ottawa twice this campaign, both times fairly briefly. She gave one rallying speech in Sandy Hill early on, appeared at a Ramadan dinner in Kanata, and touted the Liberals’ transit spending at a city trainyard the next morning in Ottawa South. But the Liberals do something here that none of the other parties do: they bring together their local candidates for events multiple times a week. The material is almost always a rehash — they “highlight” things they’ve already done more than announce new things — but they give a sense that the Liberal candidates really are a team, people who know each other and work together.
You can hit a lot of places in greater Toronto in a day, so in the hard calculations involved in deploying a leader’s limited time, it makes sense for all the leaders to stay there as much as they can. They go farther afield when they’re running up the score or striving to turn a strong minority into a majority.
When two parties are running neck-and-neck and the third is trying to salvage what seats it can, which is where we are at the halfway mark of this campaign, don’t expect the parties to look much beyond the Ontario you can see from the CN Tower.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats are neck-and-neck, according to three separate recent polls. The Tories are destroying the Liberals, which was what Ford was put into his party’s leadership to do. But they’re now having to resist attacks from an unexpected direction.
On Thursday, the still-kicking Liberals shared detailed allegations that Ford himself broke party rules in 2016 by helping an Etobicoke candidate he favoured sign up bogus members. Allegations supported by affidavits from the time, sworn by an aggrieved rival candidate and her campaign workers. And an audio recording of Ford himself, sounding very much like he’s promising to pay for people’s Tory party memberships if they’ll just sign this paper here, please.
Ford said it’s all guff, investigated by the Tories long before Patrick Brown flamed out and Ford took over, and found to be groundless. But one of the first things Ford did as Tory leader was to overturn a batch of nominations that had been challenged but upheld under Brown. Ford himself doesn’t believe the party’s investigations from around then were reliable.
I mean, they obviously weren’t: the very same committee said Brown could run for party leader again, then disqualified him as a local candidate after he dropped out. Kangaroo courts have higher standards than that. Even actual kangaroos probably do.
In the same way as the Liberals’ Sudbury nomination mess revealed Kathleen Wynne to be not that different from other politicians in some important ways, the new Tory nomination scandal implicates Ford in Brown-era messes.
He was always a high-risk choice for the Progressive Conservative party. A populist who was eager to ditch Brown’s years of work crafting a centrist platform that voters would like. Not a refined politician. Just good folks, speaking the truths that the Tory rank and file has been desperate to hear talked up loud and proud. But clumsy sometimes, shrugging off detail, weirdly unfamiliar with even basics about how the provincial government works. Like how a law gets passed.
These qualities can be passed off as charms when things are going well. Turns out that in other circumstances, they’re actually the weaknesses they appear to be.
Ford himself has been sticking mostly to Tory-friendly greater Toronto lately: Tillsonburg (Tory-held), Brantford (Liberal Dave Levac is retiring) and Hamilton (solidly New Democrat downtown but with Liberals likely in trouble in the suburbs) on Thursday.
So far, Ford’s been to Ottawa once this campaign, and that was for a meet-and-greet at a pub in Carp on a weekday afternoon before he left for Renfrew. It’s scant attention to the eastern end of Ontario.
Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak held a media session in Orléans in 2014 to amend his earlier refusal to fund a second phase of light-rail construction in Ottawa.
In 2014, Tory leader Tim Hudak made multiple trips to Ottawa. Five by my count, though one was to take back stuff he’d said on a previous trip about Ontario’s being too broke to fund extensions of the light-rail system. He released major platform planks here, including the details of his Million Jobs Plan. He had candidates with honest shots in Ottawa West-Nepean and Ottawa-Orléans especially. Their odds are even stronger this time, but Tory candidates aren’t getting the same backing from the centre.
NDP leader Andrea Horwath received a raucous welcome from NDP supporters at candidate Jennifer McKenzie’s headquarters in downtown Ottawa in 2014.
The New Democrats’ Andrea Horwath came here one time in 2014, for a quick walk through a Montreal Road café and a bit of handshaking on Somerset Street. The NDP had no realistic hopes in Ottawa and her visit was just enough to inoculate them against the charge they didn’t care about us at all. Horwath’s made one visit here so far in 2018, for a quick speech in the middle of the Victoria Day weekend. It’s not much.
2018 Liberal candidates, from left: Stephanie Maghnam (Kanata-Carleton), Yasir Naqvi (Ottawa Centre), Bob Chiarelli (Ottawa West-Nepean) and John Fraser (Ottawa South) chat with the Prince of Wales Bridge in the background.
Kathleen Wynne has been to Ottawa twice this campaign, both times fairly briefly. She gave one rallying speech in Sandy Hill early on, appeared at a Ramadan dinner in Kanata, and touted the Liberals’ transit spending at a city trainyard the next morning in Ottawa South. But the Liberals do something here that none of the other parties do: they bring together their local candidates for events multiple times a week. The material is almost always a rehash — they “highlight” things they’ve already done more than announce new things — but they give a sense that the Liberal candidates really are a team, people who know each other and work together.
You can hit a lot of places in greater Toronto in a day, so in the hard calculations involved in deploying a leader’s limited time, it makes sense for all the leaders to stay there as much as they can. They go farther afield when they’re running up the score or striving to turn a strong minority into a majority.
When two parties are running neck-and-neck and the third is trying to salvage what seats it can, which is where we are at the halfway mark of this campaign, don’t expect the parties to look much beyond the Ontario you can see from the CN Tower.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
