Last October, Ontario's Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty finally saw the writing on the wall. The gas plant and ORNGE scandals could no longer be swept under the rug. It was clear that McGuinty's minority government was going to be defeated on a confidence motion and and election was going to be forced. And that was an election that ol' Dalton almost certainly was going to lose. My Liberal friends like to tell me what a gifted politician McGuinty is, but that's always been nonsense. Like Stephen Harper and Barack Obama, McGuinty has been gifted with the opponents he had. He's never actually beaten anybody that impressive. Ernie Eves was discredited after a decade of Conservative rule. John Tory is a great man, but an impressively bad politician. And Tim Hudak, as I've long said, is the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth. It seemed that as long as the Ontario Progressive Conservatives insisted on being the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, Dalton McGuinty would keep winning.
But something changed in the last 18 months. The NDP under Andrea Horwath began an improbable rise in public opinion. In my opinion, there was a very real chance that Horwath could have replaced McGuinty's minority with one of her own.
So the premier exercised the only option left to him. He quit. But he went further than that. He also prorogued the legislature until a replacement as Liberal leader could be elected. And the very same people who were outraged by Harper's prorogations couldn't stop congratulating McGuinty for his, mostly because they're shameless hypocrites and assholes. I condemned both, and rightly so.
Anyhow, the second McGuinty's resignation was announced, Liberal Party insiders started lining up to get former MPP Sandra Pupatello in the race. Then the media got on board. That everybody could be so spectacularly wrong was striking to me. That so many "experts" could misread the atmosphere out there was nothing less than amazing.
First, Pupatello is from the more conservative wing of the party, and that just isn't where the next election is going to be fought. The only way that Tim Hudak is ever going to elected premier of this province is by accident. He polls incredibly well when there's no chance of anyone voting for him, but as soon as he opens his stupid fucking mouth, he drops fifteen points.
My feeling is that the Ontario Tories are barely going to be a factor in the next election. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they dropped to third place at Queen's Park, although that's not an official prediction. The battle over who forms the next government is going to be between the Liberals and the NDP, and the Grits weren't going to pull that off with someone like Pupatello staking out positions to McGuinty's right.
Second, as the media and the party machinery began lining up behind her, Pupatello grew arrogant. She said that she wouldn't bring the legislature back into session until she won a seat, which could have taken months. As it is, Queen's Park has been shuttered for four months now and the public is only getting angrier.
The Liberal brand has been so badly damaged over the last couple of years that it would have probably been better for the party to have a leader outside of Queen's Park. They're going to need a ton of money and a superior effort to convince people that they're no longer the McGuinty Liberals. The chances of pulling either off while taking shots in Question Period over the remaining McGuinty scandals are not good. And that assumes that the legislature sits for any length of time. My guess is that the Grits get taken out in a confidence vote on their Throne Speech.
I thought that Gerard Kennedy was probably the best leader the Liberals had. He's personally very popular and he could do battle with the NDP and probably win. He also has the added benefit of not having been associated with McGuinty for years. The last thing the Grits need is ads morphing their new leader into McGuinty and, having been in federal politics since 2006, Kennedy makes those hard to produce.
For reasons that I still don't understand, Kennedy never gained any traction and the left wing candidate became Kathleen Wynne. And that's where everybody got a bad case of the stupids.
Wynne's opponents, mostly from the Pupatello camp, couldn't really go after her for the most obvious reason: her long tenure in the McGuinty cabinet. So they hit her on being from Toronto, which was a bad idea. If the Grits want to stay in power, they can't afford to lose any Toronto area seats. I don't see how they do it without picking up Peter Shurman's Thornhill riding.
And then there were dark mutterings about Wynne's lesbianism. I had no idea that she was gay until a Pupatello spinner went on the Internet to condemn a whisper campaign that no one else had heard of. Here's how cynical politics is, folks. If you want to draw attention to someone's homosexuality, you pre-emptively highlight non-existent efforts to make it an issue by saying how ugly they are.
It worked, too. When the Toronto Star endorsed Pupatello last week, they made Wynne's sexuality part of the column in a way that managed to insult pretty much everybody.
The convention delegates weren't buying it and Wynne won on the third ballot tonight. Sandra Pupatello managed to piss away what was increasingly looking like a sure thing. As the other candidates dropped out after the first two ballots, the majority of them went to Wynne and took their delegates with them. When Pupatello didn't win on the first ballot, she fell apart rapidly, which is pretty much what I expected to happen.
Does it make any difference in the coming election? I don't think so. Wynne has the right politics to fight the NDP, but she lacks Kennedy's charisma and popularity. Worse, for all intents and purposes, she is Dalton McGuinty, or she may as well be when the NDP and Tories get through with her. As someone who was so senior in cabinet for so long, she can't just walk away from the McGuinty scandals.
Because she has a seat, Wynne has no credible way of avoiding calling Queen's Park back. I expect that we'll start hearing calls for that by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. If she doesn't have a throne speech ready to go by the second or third week of February, she isn't going to have a honeymoon as premier and the public could very well start agitating for an election, which the NDP will be more than happy to give them.
While she won't get crushed as badly as Sandra Pupatello would have, I still think that she'll lose. Not having given this a great deal of thought, we'll start talking about the next Liberal leadership race by the first of April.
The only way that can be avoided is through a Liberal coalition with the NDP. Not an accord, which the Dippers have been burned by before - an actual coalition complete with seats at the cabinet table. The problem with that scenario is that most Liberals are too arrogant to share power with anybody and it could very well start a civil war.
The ultimate responsibility for the coming decline and fall of the Ontario Liberal Party rests with Dalton McGuinty. He could have lost an election and resigned, giving the party time to rebuild under a new leader. Instead, he's ending two careers at once: his and that of his successor.
It's hard to see how Wynne survives as leader after losing to the NDP. What's likely to happen is that there'll be an endless stream of Liberal leaders, not unlike what we're seeing with the federal party. And you just can't win government under those circumstances.
The next couple of months are going to be fun to watch.
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