Thursday, June 12, 2014

Liberals win in Ontario, hooray!

I haven't written any posts about the Ontario election campaign because I haven't been following it very closely, but now that the results are in, here are some random observations.
First, I am just so glad to see the Liberals win in Ontario, and the Conservatives lose. I sincerely hope this will mark the last time we will see a political party in Canada ever think it can get elected by threatening to throw people out of work.
On a personal basis, I am glad that Kathleen Wynne won, just to show once and for all that people will vote for a woman who is gay -- and the crowd cheered when Wynne invited her partner to join her on stage during her victory speech.
There will be lots of analysis for the NDP, but it seems that people blamed the NDP for causing the election in the first place, over a budget that was perhaps not outstanding but was at least OK, and they also accepted Wynne's argument that a vote for Howarth was a vote for Hudak.
The polling companies are going to have to look at their "likely voter" models -- even just before the election, the polls showed Wynne and Hudak in a dead heat, though maybe it will be found that the Liberals were able to use the Hudak threat to get their vote out.
Oh, and David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, should be ashamed of himself for fucking with his editorial board and then lying about it. I agree with Dawg

When a party tries to send opposing voters down a blind alley, the same party covertly attempts a “decline your ballot” strategy to give itself an electoral edge, and the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper essentially lies to the public (and is defended for doing so), something has gone badly awry with the way we do politics. Democracy is fragile, requiring the people themselves to make it operational. When they are deliberately misled by party and press alike, seemingly with impunity, we’re heading down a nasty slippery slope.

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