2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Martin Regg Cohn)
Doug Ford’s stunning admission that he kept faith with Donald Trump – right up to voting day in America – breaks faith with voters here in Ontario as the Feb. 27 election looms, says NDP Leader Marit Stiles. She would say that.
After all, her Ontario New Democrats need a catastrophic slip-up by Ford to stop his Progressive Conservatives from coasting to the big win projected by opinion polls. So is Ford’s big blunder big enough to block his majority trajectory? Stiles still believes that campaigns matter, that politicians are unpredictable, that voters are not automatons. The rookie leader says Ontarians are just now getting to know her – and don’t know Ford well enough.
“Donald Trump had made it very clear – even before he was elected president for the second time – that he was coming after Canada,” Stiles told the Democracy Forum I hosted at Toronto Metropolitan University on Wednesday. “The idea that he would still, in light of that, support somebody like Donald Trump says a lot about Doug Ford,” given that the U.S.
president was an election denier and tariff promoter. “It speaks again to Doug Ford’s character – it speaks to what he is.” How much will it hurt him? A better question is how much it will help Stiles.
After all, she’s not the only one trying to topple him as premier. The story of Ontario politics, the history of its elections, is a perennial battle between New Democrats and Liberals fighting it out over the so-called progressive, anti-PC vote – while the PCs come out on top. So who can defeat Doug Ford? Predictably, Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie told the Democracy Forum the day before that she could finish off Ford.
Unsurprisingly, Stiles said in her appearance the next day that only the NDP could do the job. It’s a critical question, because the competing policies of the two rival parties have far more in common with each other than with Ford’s Tories. It’s also the question that came up most often from audience members at the Democracy Forum wondering why Liberals and New Democrats don’t make common cause against Ford.
The NDP has an answer. It’s about positioning – and choosing. “We are best positioned, without question, to defeat Ford,” Stiles counters.
“We have the second-most seats compared to Mr. Ford, we have seats in every region.” Yet the NDP keeps losing byelections and it’s running third in in the polls, behind the Liberals and far behind Ford’s Tories.
Stiles insists her supporters “want that choice, they’re not happy with Liberals ...
and I like that we have choices in our political system.” Which is why Stiles is fighting campaigns on two fronts – attacking Ford in one breath while criticizing Crombie in the next. She told our audience that Crombie would fit comfortably in a cabinet of Ford’s Tories.
And yet both leaders sound remarkably similar in their critiques of Ford’s failures on health care, doctor shortages, housing shortfalls and funding for colleges and universities. Both are focused, almost as much as Ford, on affordability. The biggest point of commonality, despite their rivalry? Echoing Crombie the day before, Stiles went on record as saying she would never prop up Ford’s Tories should they fall short of a majority – and that she’d work with the Liberals.
“I will absolutely not prop Doug Ford and the Conservatives up, you can bank on that – I’m not supporting him, no way, no how, in no scenario,” the NDP leader told me. “I will work with anyone on issues that we share, where we share common values.” One of Stiles’s signature promises is to remove costly tolls on Highway 407 – not just for trucks, as the NDP pledged in the last election campaign, but for all drivers within 100 days of taking power.
Facilitating an urban sprawl free-for-all might seem like a U-turn for a party that fights for more bike lanes and fewer cars on the roads, but Stiles sees a vote-winner. Whatever the environmental toll of more cars on highways, Stiles won’t talk about the financial cost either. She argues that it would undermine her negotiations with the private company that leases the highway and sets the tolls.
“We’re going to negotiate – I am not going to tell that company what I’m willing to pay right now,” she insisted. The only certainty is that it will be costly. And the dollar amount likely won’t be included in the supposedly fully costed campaign platform that Stiles is promising (she wouldn’t say when).
“We’re staging it out,” Stiles teased. “I wish I could tell you the actual, the whole package, but again – this is a campaign.” That’s democracy.
* * * The appearances this week by both the NDP’s Stiles and the Liberals’ Crombie at the Democracy Forum can be viewed online. I’ll be hosting Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner at the Democracy Forum next Tuesday, while PC Leader Doug Ford has declined an invitation to appear during the election. Disclosure: I’m a senior fellow at the Dais at TMU, which sponsors the events.
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