For political shock value, it will be difficult to top the Liberals’ stunning provincial victory last week.
It was almost universally expected Ontarians would elect a minority government; the only question would be the parties’ pecking order.
As we said when the writ was dropped “this election is Tim Hudak’s to lose, but as we’ve seen before he’s fully capable of that.”
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We believed it then and still do. Hudak did the right thing in resigning, but if the Tories expect to regain power (or even be a force) in four years, they need to remove what passes for their political brain trust.
Political Science 101 is to control your own message, and the Hudakians couldn’t even manage that. They used questionable math and catch phrases in place of solid policy and seemed off-balance when questions arose.
They can whine all they like about attack ads (and they have) but if you step in what amounts to political dog-doo, you have to scrape it off your own shoe. The opposition isn’t about to help.
Ontarians by and large know we’re in a financial mess and were begging someone to come along and straighten it out.
Instead, they were confronted with the Regressive Conservatives.
We wanted the house cleaned up, not burned down.
Hudak’s message so scared voters that they chose to re-elect the very party responsible for getting us into this mess.
There’s no doubt Wynne certainly knows where the bodies are. She’s helped bury most of them.
So now, we get to find out what she’s really made of. Wynne no longer has the McGuinty legacy (or stain) on her. This is her show.
Is she part of the incompetent corruption-ridden government of the recent past or can she rise to the occasion?
The problems haven’t changed.
We still have a huge public service bureaucracy we can’t afford, we still have a broken arbitration system that feeds that problem, our utility rates are robbing us of jobs and investment, and our economic focus is fuzzy at best.
Welcome back, Ms. Wynne.
