The rising of the hard right in Canada

What a difference four months can make.

Since June we have witnessed what is becoming a seismic shift in the political landscape.

It began with the election of Doug Ford in Ontario. Ford came to his moment almost by accident after winning the Conservative leadership despite losing the popular vote for it in the wake of the totally unexpected ouster of Patrick Brown.

Running a campaign based on obfuscation and simplistic (and generally fictional) narratives, he managed to get a majority government thanks to the deep unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne, the ineptitude of the Horwath led ONDP, who only decided with a couple months to go to pretend to be left wing, and our ludicrous excuse for an electoral system.

Having been gifted the premiership by circumstance has not prevented Ford -- with the, to date, full compliance and complicity of his caucus of "progressive" conservatives -- from unleashing the beginnings of a radically right wing agenda that has included cancelling the new sex-ed curriculum as well as the scheduled minimum wage hike, threatening to use the notwithstanding clause to get his way slashing the size of Toronto City Council during an ongoing municipal election, pulling the rug out from under those on a basic income trial project and musing about stripping workers of all the rights they had gained under the Liberal Bill 148, among other things.

He is likely just getting started.

Ford also seemed terribly reluctant to disavow neo-fascist Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy after she posed in a photo with him at Ford Fest, the Ford family's annual attempt at a low rent version of Triumph of the Will.

While they came nowhere near winning power the People’s Alliance in New Brunswick broke through in the provincial election there last week to take three seats and potentially hold the balance of power.

The People's Alliance, among other things, is fixated on stripping Francophone rights and on bilingualism.

Given that neither the Liberals or Progressive Conservatives won a majority, the People's Alliance may yet end up having a major influence on government policy in this minority parliament.

Finally, of course, this week saw the triumph of the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) in a provincial election that led to a party other than the Liberals or the Parti Québécois winning for the first time since 1966. They will have a majority government based on a mere 37.4% of the total vote. 

The CAQ's right populist brand of nationalism is central to its message and goals. The very first thing its leader and the premier-designate François Legault did after his victory was to promise to use the notwithstanding clause to push through a law banning the wearing of religious headgear by public employees in "positions of authority" such as police officers and teachers.

He seems very anxious to get down to the business of bigotry.

He has also pledged to lower immigration levels in Quebec from 50,000 to 40,000 a year while subjecting immigrants to a nebulous "Quebec values" test the failing of which could potentially lead to their deportation.

His comments and win brought praise from groups such as extreme right La Meute as well as from France's National Front neo-fascist leader Marine Le Pen. Legault disavowed this but it still speaks volumes.

The CAQ is looking to enact nativist polices like a larger "baby bonus" to encourage women in Quebec to have more than one child. The idea, as the Montreal Gazette put it, is that this would "stimulate the economy, reduce the number of immigrants and preserve the weight of Quebec within the Canadian federation" by "counting on women to repopulate Quebec." Its commitment to help seniors stay in their homes longer is at least in part obviously similarly motivated by a desire to appeal to a certain demographic.

All is couched in a program that includes cutting the Quebec public service by at least one percent and, interestingly, reducing the number of Montreal's city councillors.

While there is something of a silver lining in Quebec that the election saw a large upswing in support for the leftist Québec Solidaire, it is a disheartening result in Canada's second most populous province, coming on the heels as it does of the result in its most populous.

This is very alarming within the context of a continental and, indeed, global resurgence of the hard right.  It remains to be seen if it will translate into unexpected support for further, overtly extremist projects such as Maxime Bernier's  People's Party of Canada or Goldy's campaign in Toronto.

End Game -- The Ontario Election and Doug Ford

In the end it was not even close.

The polls were wrong again though they were wrong in favour of the ONDP. While many showed a race that was neck-and-neck going into yesterday, the Conservatives ended up winning 40.49% of the vote to the ONDP's 33.57%. The Liberals garnered but 19.59%.

This led to a massive Ford majority government. The ONDP are now the Official Opposition -- a role they have greatly coveted -- while the Liberals did not win enough seats to get party status in the commons. The Greens broke through winning their first seat ever with party leader Mike Schreiner triumphing in Guelph.

42% of voters stayed home.

That should tell us something about how people broadly feel about the "options" on offer and it is a fact that would likely have benefited the left if we actually had one.

You can try to sell shit as Shinola all you want. Doesn't mean the people are going to believe or buy into it.

The question is if the program on offer from the ONDP (never mind the totally spent Liberals) was so "inspiring" why did it motivate all too few people to vote for it?

While voter turnout increased from 2014 by almost 7% to a still sad 58%, the combined total vote of the ONDP and Liberals DECREASED by just over 9% (from a combined 62.4% to a combined 53.16%). The Green vote remained almost identical (4.6% as opposed to 4.84%).

That means that almost all of the new voters showing up voted Ford and Conservative.

All through the election there were clear signs that the ONDP was only being considered by some voters not because they wanted to embrace the ONDP's slightly, kinda in some places, more "left" than the Liberals platform but because they wanted to stop both Wynne and Ford. One poll showed 46% of those leaning NDP were doing so for this reason alone.

This type of negative motivation is often not enough for people to end up going to the polling station when push comes to shove. Though this will take time, the need to build a clear alternative to the status quo parties that can eventually grow to the point where people will not feel they are "wasting" their vote by supporting it has never been clearer.

After last night's results in Ontario activist Gabriel Haythornthwaite's incisive look to the future for the left is an even more important read: Ontario’s 2018 Election: Pessimism Today, Strategic Organizing Tomorrow.

The wages of liberalism in the US was Trump. While Ford is not a Trump, the wages of liberalism, in either the NDP or Liberal version, have proven to be the same kind of force of disillusion here too.

Amidst all of this there are a couple of points that also stand out:

1) While they may have "won" opposition status the NDP and its partisans will regret having supported the 'strategic voting' nonsense line that has been used to keep the left down for decades. Once you have affirmed that the Liberals were right all along when they said "stopping something that is worse is more important than voting for what you believe in or actually want" it is very hard to go back.

As we saw in the 2015 federal election -- where the NDP was also going in as opposition and with far more seats than the Liberals as it will be in 2022 here -- the way voters shift between the "lesser evil" options is based on broad trends as opposed to deep analysis and with the right leader the Liberals will have no problem in bouncing back against the milquetoast ONDP should the circumstances allow.

You can't bury the Liberal Party by promising that you will be a mildly better version of them and by embracing their cynical and defeatist electoral 'strategic' narratives.

2) The ability of the media and both the Conservatives and the Liberals to portray the NDP as "extremists" is in no small part due to the NDP's own efforts to eschew socialism and embrace reactionary, neo-liberal narratives about 'fiscal responsibility'.

To say there was nothing remotely "extreme" about the ONDP's platform would be putting it mildly. But the counter to this is not to actually affirm the narratives that the right has managed to make mainstream that any radical vision of transforming society is somehow 'scary'. By promising up and down that you do not have one and can trusted to efficiently take over the managing of the capitalist state seamlessly and with no reason for Bay St. to be worried, a party reinforces the validity of the idea that people should fear a left agenda.

Bay St. is going to try to bury any even mildly progressive reforms -- just look at the attacks Wynne faced with the minimum wage and new labour laws as well as what happened with the Rae government between 1990-1995 -- let alone an actually radical one.

We cannot counter this by capitulating to Bay St's narratives, but only by confronting them point-by-point and ceaselessly working to push the overall political discourse to the left. Leftists have done this before, including in Canada, and they can certainly do it again.

3) The ONDP knows now it can dangle a platform that is only marginally to the "left" of the Liberals and get great applause and largely uncritical support from many left activists. For example (as I have noted before) the Pharmacare plank was farcically limited in its scope, though it did at least somewhat embrace the principle of universality. The terrible childcare plan and the means-tested dental care plan did not even do that. Yet all were hailed by many former critics of the party as something to celebrate and be excited about.

While there was a leftist argument to be made for supporting the ONDP on election day in spite of its limitations due to the alternatives, those who tried to portray this last platform as a significant shift to the left or as a truly transformative or social democratic one have emboldened greatly the party's right and its strategists.

Now that Horwath and the ONDP are the opposition, we can surely anticipate that they will work to make themselves seen as the responsible "government in waiting" as the party did federally from 2011 to 2015. They can do so safe in the knowledge that half-baked, neo-liberal, means-tested  program proposals will be lauded by many as being something they are not.

There are going to be very difficult days ahead as Ford first seeks to stop and dismantle some of what was achieved in the final year of the Wynne government and then turns to gutting social programs and to deep austerity under the guise of "efficiency".

These days will be made harder if the left allows its efforts to resist to be dissipated by politicians and leaders beholden to narrow electoral methods and opportunistic careerist goals. Building further mass alternatives of left activism and resistance to Ford outside of and independent of this is now of immediate critical importance.

Ontario’s 2018 Election: Pessimism Today, Strategic Organizing Tomorrow

By Gabriel Haythornthwaite

The merry-go-round of Ontario's corporate politics is reaching its dizzying conclusion today and I imagine I am not the only one who wants off this shitty ride.


Voters decided well before the election that they were not going to fall for yet-another Liberal rendition of simultaneously playing the good and bad corporate cop. The one good thing about watching the returns tonight will be to see a wholesale massacre of the Wynne caucus. A clever politician to the last, Wynne has pleaded the case in recent days for 'practical' centrism to hold the gates against either a blackshirt or Red barbarian majority. I doubt this plea will save official party status (8 seats) for the ruling Liberals. Regrettably, the joy of watching Liberal heads roll will be more than offset by seeing Regressives and Northern Democrats take their place.

Representing the coming of a political nuclear-winter is Doug Ford. With the looks of Fester Adams, the mannerisms of Lurch and the personal charm of the White-Walker King, the elder Ford looks set to grab the Iron Throne at Queen's Park. This Worst-Case scenario looked a dead-cert at the beginning of the campaign but the White-Walker Regressives have almost blown it yet again. An obviously ill-prepared leader -- elected by a party enduring civil war while choking on plumes of multiple serious scandals -- has played it safe by withholding a platform until the last minute and pledging no service cutbacks despite promising $6 billion in public cuts. The negative aspects of the Trump effect for the liberal majority seems to have been stronger than the appeal it holds for the die-hard ‘fash’ and the deeply confused. Anything less than a Worst-Case majority would be a humiliating defeat for the Regressive Conservatives.

Andrea Horwath may well be the second luckiest leader of our times (1st prize goes to the paper-deep Trudeau the Younger). Arrayed against one of Ontario’s most unpopular premiers and a hard-right opposition leader with the appeal of dysentery, Horwath's brain-trust has decided not to run to the Right of the Liberals as they did in 2014 (and the fed NDP did in 2015) but, heeding the call of Corbyn/Sanders, has reverted to running just to the left of the ruling Liberals. And it has paid off—no doubt there will be considerable relief in the Northern Democrat inner-sanctum in winning the loyal opposition spot with a doubled caucus rather than being thrust into power.

There has been a surge of left-activist support for the NDP this time out which has been predicated on both ABC tactical considerations (an understandable if short-term impulse) and frankly inaccurate assessments that the NDP has made a dramatic 'return' to the 'Left'. But the weak broth of the NDP platform, complete with its purely token call for tax rises on the rich (1.5% corporate, 2% on those making more than $300k, leaving rates still near historic lows) and tepid pretenses to expand social provision, is well to the right of the actually social democratic platform Bob Rae campaigned on in 1990. Lest we forget, little more than 6 months ago, the NDP was running over to the Bastards of Commerce to repeat their right wing legislative committee attacks on the Liberal’s minimum wage/labour standards Bill 148, saying the move towards a $15 minimum wage was too fast and that rich business owners needed time and tax cuts (‘offsets’) to afford a move towards a living wage.

Which brings us to the question of what to expect in the aftermath of tonight's electoral shit-fest:

1) Regardless of the voting outcome, the corporate rich will continue to drive the agenda of government. They have the debate mega-phones (conventional media still rules the regressive 'marketplace of ideas'), the allegiance of Ministry bureaucrats who play a decisive role in the affairs and actions of the state and the fealty of all established parties who are dedicated to the global competitive position of the corrupt cartels which dominate the economy. There simply is no effective working class counter-balance to the multiple dimensions of corporate power as labour organizations have less interest than ever in developing independent democratic politics.

2) However, the strategic considerations of advancing corporate power have become more challenging than in neoliberalism’s salad-days during the 1990s. There is significance in the fact that all three parties have beat their campaign chests against austerity cutbacks despite all being deeply implicated in the austerity that has gripped the province for nearly two generations. Particularly important is the fact that Ford's Blue-Men have felt compelled to campaign against cuts--the Regressive in my riding has pledged to end hospital overcrowding, decrying 'hallway medicine’. Unending economic crises for the working majority, popular sentiment for public services and the organized resistance against cuts has resulted in the ideological puncturing of the austerity model.

3) This does not mean that cuts are over. Far from it. Anti-social austerity will continue regardless of the outcome. Token tax rises on the rich will barely slow down the cuts let alone end or reverse them, and it bears noting that Bob Rae made his government the enthusiastic agent of neoliberalism less than half-way through his term despite running on a platform well to the left of today's ONDP. The Ford Regressives are about to embark on the same uber-lying approach to governing that the BC Liberals did in 2001 -- talk rainbows and good government to get elected and then go into turbo-cut mode.

4) The position of social opposition to the corporate rich and their right wing party wing-men is much weaker than in the 1990s. The agenda of austerity cuts does not have the wind of the imperial West's victory over Communism at its back as Harris had in 1995--and that does represent an ideological opening for a democratic left wing politics. But, since the 1990s, labour has become much diminished economically and has politically capitulated to right wing austerity. There are inspired activist groups undertaking effective organizing actions, but we are far from the rooted and politically assertive worker-led social movements of the past. With neither positioning (e.g. opposition caucuses inside the unions, popular committees in neighbourhoods and workplaces) nor strategy, today's activists run the risk of replaying the disjointed anti-Harris Days of Action protests, but at a lower material and political level.

But we do have smart, experienced and capable activists who have come together in some important centres, particularly in the GTA. We also have the benefit of historical experience to draw upon. And a legitimacy crisis of neoliberal ideology and its flagship of austerity cuts. Protest, yes, but also take some time to balance-sheet from what we can learn from the successes and limits of campaigns like Fight For $15. Here is some food for thought towards how we might take on the dystopic present being reconfirmed in this election campaign:

A) Develop new publications that can reach mass audiences outside the activist world. I would not rule out the role social media can play but nor do I think leftists can rely exclusively upon it. We need more immediate bulletins (which can have social media platforms) to inform the arguments, emphasis and co-ordination of the anti-Ford protest movement (as advocated by Doug Nesbitt in an excellent retrospective piece published in RankandFile.ca (http://rankandfile.ca/four-labour-lessons-from-the-harris-years/) but also longer-range strategic publications that can flesh out a POLITICAL plan towards independent left wing democratic action in support of the working majority.

B) Develop campaigns around key themes of importance to the working majority. For example, opposing health and education cuts, tax-the-rich, workplace safety/challenging the loathsome WSIB and expanding annual paid-holidays. These campaigns should have a flexible plan with a clear timeline to include activities like the petitioning of F4$15 but also be anchored by speaking tours to intrude upon the corporate monopoly over public debate and encourage local initiative and on-going organization.

C) Local organization should include the building of opposition caucuses at all levels of labour and the creation of workplace and neighbourhood committees. These organizations should combine an open-ended commitment to the long-term interests of the working majority with a sharp focus on key issues of interest to the locale of the organization itself.

D) Local organizations should be encouraged to 'combine' by 'industrial' sector (e.g. education, health, retail services, manufacturing, etc.), regionally and, eventually, province-wide to facilitate the sharing of lessons, resources and in coordinating democratic action.

E) New left wing networks are needed to complement popular organizations of the working majority with a focus on long-term strategic planning towards independent democratic action in politics. I think we should be flexible and open-minded about how these networks come about, e.g. whether they are new initiatives or the coming together of existing left wing groups, but we do need a clear and firm sense of association requirements (e.g. programmatic agreement, dues, plus effective activity within the network’s organization) and what they are tasked to do in the short, medium and long-term.

F) The publications, campaigns, local/regional/sectoral organizations and political networks should have sharp eyes on the electoral cycles, local, provincial and federal. Not in a narrow, exclusive way but rather in productive relationship to extra-electoral activity. At least one year out from an election, special committees should be formed (local, regional and eventually provincial) to sketch out how campaigns and other organizing initiatives should inform a political action strategy in the lead-up to and during the election. These democratic action committees can look to work with labour councils, union locals and other popular organizations to develop campaign issue themes of critical importance to the working majority (promoted through educational and agitational means), sponsor all-candidates meetings (ACMs) to highlight these themes during the election, intrude in other ACMs and the corporate media, do canvassing as F4$15 folks have been doing, sponsor kitchen-table meetings in communities to draw in new energies and experience, etc.

Eventually, the activity suggested above can build the organizational and experiential basis for effective independent left wing candidates in elections themselves; to break out of lesser-evil-ism and to avoid the demoralization that can result from running candidates with limited organization, profile, and experience.

Nothing written above will change what happens today at the polls. But putting all our left wing heads together in new combinations towards effective strategies can create better political possibilities going forward.

Gabriel Haythornthwaite was elected on an anti-austerity and direct democracy platform for one term as a labour-allied school board trustee in Cowichan, BC (2002-5). He has worked with First Nations organizations in education management and policy research for 10 years. Currently, Gabriel is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Education at Western University in London, On. researching First Nations education self-government arrangements. 

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See also: Vote NDP to stop Ford...but don't try to sell it as supporting a leftist agenda

See also: Vote Communist in twelve ridings and other thoughts for election day in Ontario

Vote Communist in twelve ridings and other thoughts for election day in Ontario

With the election a mere two days off the standard calls for strategic voting are reaching a fever pitch though, as always, they are not really calls for strategic voting at all and this time they favour the New Democrats instead of the usual beneficiaries, the Liberals.

I will return to the question of strategic voting in a moment, but there is a party that has put forth an unapologetically radical, anti-capitalist platform that deserves support in the twelve ridings in which they are running candidates, the Communist Party.


The Communist Party platform embraces real public ownership models, a $20 an hour minimum wage, fare free transit, justice for Indigenous people, a leftist tax reform model, actually effective legal limits and penalties for pollution and emissions as opposed to the market driven cap-and-trade and carbon tax models, ending public funding for Catholic schools, and much more.

You can read their full platform at Our Program: A People's Alternative for Ontario, can see their full election leaflet on our post Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism" and can watch the speech by their leader Dave McKee at their campaign launch at the end of this post.

Their candidates are:

I hope people will give consideration to a vote that sends a serious message of opposition not just to this-or-that aspect of modern capitalism and neo-liberalism, but that rejects the entire system and all of its evils completely. I feel that the dedicated activists the Communists are running are all head-and-shoulders above any other electoral option right now.

Just one of the CP memes with points from their excellent platform

Of course, the Communists are running in only 12 ridings. What about the other 112? And what about the certain cries that even where the Communists are running every vote should be directed to the NDP and "stopping Ford"?

Needless to say, actual "strategic voting" does not work that way which is why it really never plays out in practice. There is no case, even this election, where an across the board vote for one party in every riding is a vote to stop the right wing alternative or where doing so in every riding is necessary.

Regardless, the underlying premises of "strategic voting" -- that activists "have no choice" but to remain in or support parties like the NDP due to the self-fulfilling logic that there is no alternative to it -- are a major part of what have led to the imprisonment of the electoral energies and vision of many leftists within an opportunistic party run by third-way careerists. These premises can be rejected and should be rejected.

They will have to be rejected at some point if we ever want to see the emergence of a genuinely leftist mass party outside of Quebec with Québec solidaire.

Given its nature and composition the Liberal Party should not be considered as an electoral alternative to the right, "strategic" or otherwise, in virtually any context and certainly not in this one. No Liberal anywhere in the province deserves a vote on Thursday.

With the dynamic of this election having led to the collapse of Liberal support in much of Ontario they are no longer seen by basically anyone as the strategic bourgeois 'progressive' option to stop a Conservative victory. Even the Toronto Star has endorsed the NDP as they did the federal NDP under similar conditions in 2011.

It is an easy enough transition for them to make as there is little of fundamental significance that separates the two parties anymore when it comes to their programs.

Now it is the New Democrats and their partisans who get to push the call for a strategic vote and to denounce in apocalyptic terms anyone who resists it. I hope the irony of this is not lost on people given that New Democrat partisans in Ontario, federally and in some other provinces have historically rejected such calls outright as generally they would have meant the obliteration of the NDP.

It is not even in the short-term interest of the left to embrace strategic voting calls as such. Every election they are made, every election the alternative is framed as catastrophic, etc. If the calls to vote for Trudeau to stop Harper or to vote for Wynne to stop Hudak were rejected by leftists there is no inherent reason to embrace the call to vote Horwath to stop Ford other than a lingering nostalgia for when the NDP was actually, at least to a degree, a socialist party.

Although meant for a different, American context one of the issues with calls for strategic voting is summed up well by this quote from a recent article in Liberation:

Unfortunately, the “lesser of two evils” argument ends up contributing to the very problem that it aims to address. By channeling people into a political system that is by its very construction anti-democratic, this argument corrodes any effort to build a powerful, militant people’s movement.

While many people and activists who I respect have said that they feel this incarnation of the Horwath led ONDP is somehow profoundly different from the previous ones, I do not at all share this analysis.

I have written at greater length as to why in articles such as Rehabilitating Andrea Horwath's leadership and the danger of a short political memory and Vote NDP to stop Ford...but don't try to sell it as supporting a leftist agenda. The ONDP yet again is acting as a brake on the aspirations of leftists and has even led many to laud and embrace terribly short-sighted proposals such as the ONDP's childcare and dental care plans that dangerously reject what was once a bedrock left principle of universality. Introducing means-tested social programs with varying payment levels is a repudiation of even social democratic principle and once entrenched such programs are very difficult to make universal while very easy to make less inclusive.

Having said that, there are no easy answers as a Ford victory would be terrible on any number of levels with very real, negative consequences for people that are not at all abstract. Neither are the consequences of continuing to support opportunistic 'progressive' parties that often end up sowing disillusion and 'austerity with a human face' abstract.

Which is why my final advice for this election remains:

Vote NDP to stop Ford if that makes sense for you in whatever community you are in.
But don't try to pretend this is a vote for anything other than a liberal platform from a party that will govern in exactly the way such a platform implies.

Bogus versus real 'scandals', the difficult road to an NDP majority and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Three

With eight days to go until election day the polls, on balance, show a statistical dead heat between the Conservatives and the NDP in Ontario. Wynne's Liberal government seems all but certain to lose the June 7 vote -- in fact, they face the very real prospect of decimation -- while the NDP appears to have held their position in the minds of voters as the progressive alternative to the dangerous Ford agenda.

With the NDP in this position -- and even ahead of the Conservatives in some surveys -- various media outlets have hurled a series of micro-"scandals" their way that, for the most part, are totally absurd and reek of desperation.

Of greater concern for those who want to see Ford lose, though, is that if the NDP and Conservatives are really neck-and-neck, both with levels of support in the high 30s, the path to a Ford majority is far clearer and more likely than the path to a Horwath one.

In this, the third of our weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

Should Horwath be walking away with this?

While the ONDP has risen rather dramatically in the polls since the writ dropped, there is ample evidence that had they been running on a platform that was more inspiring and was not simply a tiny smidgen to the "left" of the Liberal one they could very well be walking away with this election right now.

For example, as Supriya Dwivedi noted on Global: 

A new poll by Ipsos conducted exclusively for Global News has found that a significant number of NDP voters, 46 per cent, are voting for the NDP in order to keep another party out of power. In other words, the NDP is benefitting from the unpopularity of the other two options, and seeming like the least bad option.

We have noted this dynamic at play in the past as well.

The difficult path to an NDP victory

Some polls have the NDP slightly ahead, while others have them slightly behind the Conservatives. Another poll has the NDP more significantly ahead. For reasons that will become clear shortly, folks wanting to see Ford stopped had best hope that this last one is the closest to the truth.

According to the CBC's poll tracker the NDP sits at 36.2% while the Conservatives are at 35.7%. Yet despite this the CBC projects a 70% likelihood of a Ford majority if these numbers are accurate.

Why?

Éric Grenier's excellent article, What the 1990 election can - and can't - tell us about the Ontario NDP's chances today, which is worth reading in full, outlines this very well:

Despite the relatively close margin between the PCs and the NDP in the polls, the Poll Tracker still heavily favours the PCs to win a majority government.
This is because the PC vote is more efficient — the party has a better base of support and is ahead in the Greater Toronto Area, where nearly half the seats in the province are located.
The projections suggest that for the New Democrats to win even a slim majority, they may need a lead of three to five points over the PCs provincewide.
In 1990, however, the New Democrats won a comfortable majority — nearly 40 seats ahead of Peterson's Liberals — despite beating the Liberals in the popular vote by only five per cent.
One of the factors contributing to the NDP's 1990 majority win (something even Rae at the time didn't see coming) was the presence of two small right-wing parties.
The Family Coalition and the Confederation of Regions (COR) parties combined for nearly five per cent of the vote provincewide in 1990. In 11 ridings, the combined vote of the Family Coalition and the COR was greater than the margin between the losing PC and winning NDP candidates.
Had enough of these votes gone to the PCs instead, the NDP would have fallen just short of a majority. The split on the right made the NDP's vote more efficient than it otherwise would have been.
Though there are several smaller right-of-centre parties running in this election, none are expected to have the same kind of impact. If they did, the NDP's chances of winning a majority government in 2018 would be better.

The disturbing reality is that Ford could win a substantial majority with a vote as low as 35-37% while the ONDP is very unlikely to.

Ludicrous NDP "scandals" while the Conservatives face real ones

Various right-wing media outlets across the province, most notably the Toronto Sun, have been seeming to try to derail the NDP's momentum with a variety of absurd micro-"scandals" that are so silly they reek of desperation.

Examples include digging up an allegedly shared meme on Facebook implying that an NDP candidate is sympathetic to Nazism when she very clearly is not, and finding a photo of an NDP candidate holding a sign at a rally a decade ago that read "Fuck the Police" -- a sentiment which many people, especially in marginalized and racialized communities have had every reason to express over the years, though Horwath and her candidate, of course, disavowed it. 

These alleged "gotcha" moments are isolated and either from many years ago or taken out of context and mean quite a bit less than, say, The Ford family’s history with drug dealing as outlined in a Globe and Mail expose in 2013 or a Conservative candidate saying "I think if someone wants to open a business and only hire people of one race...I think they should have that right" as recently as 2015.

Meanwhile, right now during the election an "Ontario PC Candidate Shares Theory Linking Schools and Hospitals to Secret ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy" while another "Carleton PC candidate says she doesn't believe climate change is man-made".

Further, of course, we saw the "Liberals claim Ford participated in 'bogus' membership sales, intimidated a PC nominee", which is a very serious allegation. This led to the farce of "Doug Ford dodges journalists before fleeing Brantford event through the back door".

I think to an objective observer it is perfectly clear which are the "scandals" actually worth paying attention to.

Buck a beer

You know a campaign is both very concerned and reaching low when:

The tweet and meme was met, rightly, with considerable derision.

Doug Ford releases detailed platform

Crickets.

Dumbest move of the election award

Memo to anyone, from any party, running anywhere, ever...this is something you should never do:

Liberal candidate crashes NDP Leader Andrea Horwath campaign event in Etobicoke

Further news/articles of interest about the campaign:

Letter from the Co-Chairs of the Danforth Jewish Circle, Multifaith Committee about NDP candidate Tasleem Raiz

This White Nationalist Says Doug Ford is Sending Him Anti-Immigrant ‘Dog Whistle’ Messages

Horwath announces three weeks of paid vacation for full-time workers

Ontario election path to victory runs through the 905

See also: Horwath rises as Ford stumbles and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Two

Vote NDP to stop Ford...but don't try to sell it as supporting a leftist agenda

As the ONDP led by centrist neo-liberal Andrea Horwath rises to new heights in the polls thanks to being seen as the "least bad" alternative to the Doug Ford insanity or the history of corruption by the Liberals, one salient question remains.


Why on earth are some leftists lining up enthusiastically to support her after her history as leader and the ONDP's transparently opportunistic stances that only the careerists and the willfully blind cannot see through?

How can leftists be excited -- except about the idea that Ford might be defeated --with the possible election of a party and leader entirely of the same ilk as Dexter, Notley, Horgan, Romanow and Doer?

Is Horwath a better alternative to Ford? Unquestionably so.

Is she better than Wynne? Given the circumstances, perhaps mildly. Especially if she seems likely to stop Ford, which she now might due to a fluke of circumstance.

Can she or an ONDP government be trusted to deliver anything remotely like their already mundane platform let alone a left agenda?

Only if you are dreaming in an election group think haze induced orange.

The ONDP platform is, at best, a tiny smidgen to the "left" of Wynne's. Much of this platform -- including the atrocious, gets worse as you read the details, vague, phased in, means tested childcare plank -- was clearly drawn up on office napkins when these least imaginative of all social democrats were caught off guard by announcements by a liberal party they wish they could replace.

Even her most outwardly "left" plank of bringing back Hydro One into public hands is based on a nonsensical, years long "buy back" formula and will have little immediate impact on hydro rates which anyone who knows anything about how they are set would understand.

But why advocate for an actually radical vision of public ownership of a utility when you can delude folks with a totally nonthreatening one?

The NDP's pharmacare plan does not even approach "universality" while its dental care plan openly eschews it.

"Change for the Better" in this case really means no change at all, just liberal governance without the Liberals. In this specific context that might work well electorally, but it is not leftism.

After her support of two Liberal austerity budgets and her campaign in 2014 how anyone could think Horwath had some conversion to socialism on the road to Toronto is beyond me.

As to those who claim that the Liberals and the Conservatives -- in this era where the right has shifted to the very far right -- are the "same old story" while the NDP are some radical alternative, they are either being intellectually dishonest or are complete idiots. Take your pick.

Any ideological differences between the ONDP and the Liberals are minuscule. They do not even exist in a serious sense. Should Horwath win, it will take exactly no time for this to become apparent.

It is always easier for some leftists to take the lazy route when jumping on another dead end NDP bandwagon as they have done time after time after time -- all while demanding that everyone else also drop their critical lens to join the mindless stampede to nowhere new -- claiming "this incarnation will be different", than to take the intellectually consistent and honest step of  saying, "no it won't" even if advocating for a tactical NDP vote.

It won't be different.

You can rest assured, and so can Bay St., that should the NDP sweep to power on June 7th, little will change, especially versus the Wynne agenda of the last year or so.

There is a segment -- sadly rather sizable at times like this -- of the Ontario left that like to talk a good game about folks like Corbyn or Mélenchon, the need for the type of serious socialist politics we see emerging in so many other countries, the need to get past the old patterns of a fundamentally bankrupt and undemocratic NDP, but who then line up to bleat out like sheep in support of transparently third way leaders like Horwath.

They talk radical two years out but tow straight-up centrist lines at election time and demand everyone else do as well. They claim those who remain critical are somehow trying to undermine something noble or are cynics.

Yet there is nothing more cynical than trying to sell what the NDP is peddling as a seriously different or compelling radical vision for "change".

Vote NDP to stop Ford if that makes sense for you in whatever community you are in.

But don't try to pretend this is a vote for anything other than a liberal platform from a party that will govern in exactly the way such a platform implies.

See also: Horwath rises as Ford stumbles and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Two

Horwath rises as Ford stumbles and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Two

While not the total fiasco out of the gate that was Tim Hudak's rapid derailment of the Conservative campaign in 2014, the scent of scandal and promises and pledges that simply don't add up seem to be putting a dent in what appeared to be an insurmountable Ford lead.


The anti-Ford vote, however, is not coalescing around the Liberals and Wynne but rather around Andrea Horwath and the New Democrats, exposing the bankruptcy of the government's re-election strategy.

As the NDP rises though so too do the attacks on them that are being made from predictable angles aimed at weaknesses of the NDP's own making.

In this, the second of our weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

407 Scandal

There is a deep historical irony that it would be the 407 toll highway -- handed to the private sector for a relative song by Mike Harris in the 90s in one of the worst privatization deals in the history of the country -- that is causing the Conservatives to go off message and stumble just when they looked to be certain to form government again for the first time in 15 years.

Having based their campaign in no small part around the need to clean up alleged Liberal corruption, the dangers of doing so become apparent when scandal begins to hover over your own party and campaign as well.

In this case Ford and the Tories have come under scrutiny after a Brampton candidate was forced to resign due to the alleged inappropriate use of personal data gleaned from 407 users for political purposes. The question is how widespread this was and if other Conservative candidates used the data as well. Police and the province's privacy commissioner have launched investigations.

You can read more about it via these articles:

Police and privacy commission join investigation into Hwy. 407 customer data theft

PC Leader Doug Ford hammered over alleged data theft; police probe urged

Ford faces tough questions as NDP asks for probe into ex-PC candidate's alleged role in data breach

Ontario elections watchdog reviewing PC candidate campaigns

Doug Ford and other PC figures pictured with man at the centre of growing data-theft scandal

For Doug Ford math seems to be hard

When it comes to explaining how he plans to deal with the loss of billions of dollars in government revenues due to his proposed tax cuts of various kinds without slashing public sector jobs and social programs, Doug Ford simply does not have an answer.

Presumably Ford thought he could just coast along like his brother Rob did with pseudo-populist rhetorical nonsense about "gravy trains" and "efficiencies" but it seems Ontarians are paying a little more attention to reality than Torontonians did during the 2010 municipal election.

His so-called "middle class" tax cut -- which unsurprisingly appears to mostly benefit the wealthy -- will cost the province $2.6 billion.

His plans to cut gas taxes and scrap cap-and-trade will lead to the loss of at least $3.2 billion.

Then there is the corporate tax cut. That would see another $1.4 billion vanish. 

How is he going to make up for this lost revenue without a vicious austerity agenda? Who knows?

Ford, of course, has not been willing to seriously answer questions about this from day one. He began the campaign by acting like a defensive bully replying pathetically with “Very simple. You haven’t done it. I’ve done it. That’s the difference. Next question” to CBC reporter Robyn Bresnahan's totally legitimate question about how he could cut as much spending as he claims he can without cutting jobs.

He has been doing the smoke and mirrors deflection routine ever since.

It looks like it may have stopped working.

Related articles:

Doug Ford declines requests to explain his 'nonsense' $469 million estimate

For Ford fact and policy free is the way to go

NDP rises to new heights in polls

The NDP is quickly gaining on the Conservatives according to many recent polls. The CBC poll tracking data has them at 33.4% compared to the Tories at 38%. The Liberals remain mired in the doldrums at 23.1%.

One poll by Ipsos Reid and Global actually had the NDP one point ahead of the Conservatives with 37% support.

This allows the NDP to attempt to position themselves as the strategic, safe progressive alternative to the Conservatives, a strategy that is not without its risks as I touched upon last week.

But Horwath certainly looks to be benefiting from a series of possibly fatal self-inflicted wounds by her opponents and is perhaps becoming the default option for many who find they have nowhere else to go.

Not a bad place to be at this stage.

The public may simply be too tired of the Liberals to consider them, and with another party promising to deliver essentially the same programs -- in some cases in a more robust way, in others differing either slightly or slightly for the worse -- without the same faces and the history, it could be their time is up.

While I do not share his overall ideological perspective Adam Radwanski in the Globe and Mail had a pretty good take on why Horwath may be able fend off the attacks on her by her opponents in his piece:  Why the usual questions about the Ontario NDP’s competence are being set aside

Horwath's 'fiscal responsibility' nonsense comes back to haunt

Speaking of self-inflicted wounds, one that Horwath has brought upon herself is the recent questioning of the NDP's math and budgetary plans due to what was a $1.4 billion annual error in the party's platform.

That being the platform that the NDP and Horwath repeatedly have sought to portray as fully costed and fiscally responsible, displaying a long-held and terribly self-defeating desire by mildly social democratic parties to appear as sound and reliable managers of the bourgeois state.

When you propose a fairly milquetoast, liberal platform that is so similar to the actual Liberal platform that you need a combination of a terrible Conservative leader and a titanically unpopular Premier to get your chance, it is easy to get tripped up by such minutiae. Especially given that it is the NDP themselves who have elevated it to importance with their fetishistic obsession with such neo-liberal policy detail that always proves to be fiction anyway.

Fortunately for them the public could be ready at this particular moment in time to get behind a liberal policy agenda without the Liberals as stated above. If a shift like that is occurring, these voters will likely not care about the error, especially given that Ford throws fictional numbers around daily as well as the long Liberal history of outlandish spending scandals and debacles.

Dave McKee's speech from the Communist Party launch

Ontario's Communist Party leader Dave McKee gave a terrific speech that touched on a number of important points when they launched their campaign in Toronto May 12. I reported on that launch already, but the speech has now been posted and it is definitely worth a listen.




Further news/article of interest about the campaign:

NDP Surges, Doug Ford Opposes Rent Control, Hydro One & more -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week One

Horwath’s NDP would ‘adjust’ Ontario cap and trade to fight climate-warming pollution

Ontario parties are ducking the issue of public auto insurance

Ontario NDP leader wouldn't introduce corner store sale of beer and wine

Ontario election campaign brings focus on nearly 2 million people living in poverty

NDP Surges, Doug Ford Opposes Rent Control, Hydro One & more -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week One

The provincial election campaign in Ontario is now a week old and with only three weeks to go until election day the desire to "change" who is arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic appears to be strong enough that the tired Liberal regime's fate may well be sealed.

Momentum has swung, at least for now, to Andrea Horwath's New Democrats as the primary alternative to the looming Doug Ford catastrophe, though not so much due to any great enthusiasm on the part of Ontario voters but rather due to the paucity of choices.

In this, the first of what will be weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

Fully 74 per cent of voters wish they had a different choice

A poll taken as the writ dropped found profoundly deep voter dissatisfaction with the various mainstream "choices" on offer. Almost three-quarters of those questioned said they wished "there was another option other than Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, PC Leader Doug Ford and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath."

This same poll also found that while it was true that Horwath was the most "popular" leader (or perhaps least unpopular) this was not based on any great embrace of her leadership by the public:

Pollster Darrell Bricker said while Horwath has an advantage on the favourability front, it’s more “neutral” since the other two have fairly high negative favourability.
“Andrea Horwath comes up better because she’s less disagreeable, not because she’s so much more likeable,” Bricker explained.

I looked at what this poll meant and its broader implications in the piece: Deep ennui greets launch of an Ontario election that is Ford's to lose

The NDP surges 

The polls all seem to agree that the NDP is surging right out of the gate. With Kathleen Wynne remaining deeply unpopular -- out of all proportion to the actual popularity of the government's recent polices and budget going into the election -- Andrea Horwath and crew seem to be shaping up as the progressive alternative to Ford in the minds of voters.

The CBC poll tracker shows the NDP up by around 3.5 points to 30.6% while the Liberals are down by 1.2% to 23.7%.

Upward trends very early in a campaign can be a double-edged sword as they leave plenty of time for opponents and the natural evolution of events to bring these numbers back down. There are countless examples of opposition parties going into elections much stronger than they finished them, the Tom Mulcair led federal NDP in 2014 being a case in point.

But there at least two reasons that NDP partisans can hope that the trend in this case may have staying power.

The first is the aforementioned general dislike for Wynne and the sense that her government should be sent packing. There comes a point -- as happened with the Rae government in 1995 -- where, as Globe and Mail analyst Adam Radwanski put it "If voters aren’t willing to buy what Wynne’s Liberals are selling, none of their advantages matter."  He further noted, when referring to Wynne's slick new ads "All the production values in the world can only go so far if voters just don’t want to hear from you any more."

How low could Wynne and the Liberals drop in the polls? Very low indeed. And a great deal more of their vote is likely to go to the NDP than the Conservatives.

Which brings us to the second reason for optimism among New Democrats, which is that it is rather easy to make the transition between them for centrists and mild progressives in this context as there so little that separates the two parties ideologically.

It is akin to dropping Coke in favour of Coke Zero.

While in most cases this would hurt the NDP -- and has time and again including in Ontario in the 2014 election -- here it allows them to transition to being a new and nonthreatening liberal party for voters scared of Ford but tired of Wynne's baggage.

As Thomas Walkom put it in the Star "Experts can parse the differences between the Liberal and NDP child care or pharmacare promises. But I suspect most voters see the two party platforms as near-identical."

Various NDP partisans may have deluded themselves otherwise, but I suspect Walkom is right.

Of course, the other side to that is that should Wynne somehow regain her footing or numbers start to trend back her way, the transition back to the Liberals from the NDP would be just as effortless.

Either way, with the Conservatives remaining steady at above 40% support the two parties are right now vying for who would be the official opposition to a massive Ford majority unless they can bring that support level down.

Doug Ford says he prefers the "market" to rent control

If you thought the housing market with soaring rents and low availability could not possibly get worse for tenants in Toronto, you would be wrong.

If Doug Ford gets elected they will get much worse.


Hydro board raises

Despite the fact that they only have their positions thanks to Wynne's short-sighted and deeply unpopular decision to privatize the bulk of Hydro One, the dim bulbs running the show there seem determined to tank her government.

How else to interpret the news that in the lead-up to an election where hydro rates are a central issue the part-time members of the utility's board of directors gave themselves a big raise?

Article: Hydro One's part-time board members gave themselves $25K raises

Of course, while Doug Ford pontificates about replacing these clueless rich people with his own group of clueless rich people, Andrea Horwath is correct in saying that the only long-term solution to hydro issues in the province is to bring Hydro One back into public hands.

That it will then be run in a fundamentally more democratic or egalitarian way under an NDP government, however, seems unlikely to say the least.

Green Party

The Green Party launched its campaign in Toronto running on a fairly progressive platform that you can read on their website. The prospects that there is room for a third mildly progressive party to gain traction in an election like this one would appear bleak.

What is clear though is that the media and the other parties are doing their best to make sure they remain that way with the Greens being shut out from the debates.

Party leader Mike Schreiner confidently predicted "We are going to make history and we are going to elect Ontario's first Green MPPs". Regardless of whether or not that would be a good thing, at this point it would not seem to be in the cards.

Two major parties run candidate slates that are over 50% women 

In an historic development two of the major parties running candidates province wide have slates that are comprised of over 50% women.  

The NDP lead the pack at 56% while the Greens followed closely at 52%.

Communist Party launch

While we are in an election where "change", as Ontario Communist Party leader Dave McKee put it,  really amounts to putting a new "jockey on the same old horse", the Communists launched their campaign on a platform that offers a genuine, unequivocally anti-capitalist vision.

I attended their campaign launch in Toronto and you can read about it at: Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism"

Further news/articles of interest about the campaign:

Another debate, another Doug Ford comment about Kathleen Wynne's smile

Avalanche of detail overwhelms Kathleen Wynne's message

No longer polling third, Horwath and the NDP are fending off attacks from both sides

NDP's Horwath has 'no interest' in coalition with Liberals

See also: Doug Ford wants you to subsidize the poverty wages of corporations

Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism"

The Communist Party launched their Ontario provincial election campaign Saturday in Toronto. All of their Toronto candidates were in attendance and spoke, including the party's provincial leader Dave McKee.

The party is running on a comprehensive -- and genuinely radical -- anti-capitalist platform that stands in complete distinction to the campaigns we are seeing from the three mainstream, bourgeois capitalist parties.

The launch, held in a hall on the Danforth, began with a speech from Toronto Danforth candidate Ivan Byard who talked about the need for a new deal for cities in Ontario among other things.

Ivan Byard, Toronto Danforth

Parkdale-High Park candidate Jay Watts followed emphasizing the efforts the Communists have made organizing with tenants in Parkdale as well as touching on housing issues more broadly. He also noted that he would be participating in an all-candidates debate with the NDP, Liberals and Greens at the Parkdale Public Library on Monday, May 14 at 7 pm. The Conservative candidate is not expected to attend.

Dave McKee, who is running in Davenport, ended with a rousing, fiery speech that spoke of the central pillars of the party's platform including the economy, housing and other essential services, and real progressive tax reform.

Jay Watts, Parkdale-High Park

McKee began by noting that there is a genuine desire for change among the people of the province, but that this notion of "change" has become depoliticized. If it is simply change for its own sake it is nothing more than changing "the jockey on the same old horse" and will likely benefit the Tories and Ford. In contrast to this McKee said it was necessary to re-politicize the idea of change and to build a working class movement around it.

McKee then went on talk about all of the three main parties making it clear that the Conservatives under Doug Ford constitute a very serious threat and that his election would result in an "immediate attack" on workers, women, racialized and marginalized communities in Ontario. He emphasized this by pointing to

Dave McKee, Party Leader

Ford's socially conservative positions around abortion rights and the sex-ed curriculum, his positions on the environment, the minimum wage, tax cuts for corporations, slashing social spending and a number of other points.

Yet, McKee pointed out that the two alternatives to Ford that could possibly be elected on June 7, the Liberals or the NDP, are running on platforms that are "weak, insufficient and timid".

McKee reviewed the dismal record of the Liberals and Kathleen Wynne including such points as the 15 years of starving health care funding -- Ontario has the lowest per capita hospital funding in the country -- and the privatization of Hydro One despite the opposition of around 75% of Ontarians and the mass mobilization against it.

Meanwhile the NDP, to McKee, lie "just incrementally to the left" of the Liberals. The NDP pharmacare plan he sees as "totally insufficient" noting its very limited nature. "Why would we accept a plan that is half-baked?" he asked to loud applause.

He then pointed to the NDP's dental care plank which is not universal but rather two-tiered.To McKee this two-tiered aspect undermines the essential principle of universality in health care and social programs. The same is true of the NDP's childcare plan which is means-tested.

"Is that universal? No. Is that progressive? No." McKee said.

The Communist Party, however, wants to mobilize around a "strong list of working class demands".

These include a shorter work week with no loss in pay as part of a broader full employment strategy. McKee touched again on housing noting the Communist Party is the only party with a serious plan aimed at "confronting and resolving the housing crisis."

The party is also in favour of a $20 an hour living wage as opposed to the bare subsistence level that even the $15 an hour minimum wage represents. "Why are we talking about minimums? Why are we not talking about what's needed?" McKee asked.

McKee brought up the party's staunchly anti-capitalist vision to prevent plant closures and corporations trying to move factories to low-wage jurisdictions. "If you leave we are going to take over your business and we are going to run it."

To McKee one of the essential issues confronting Ontario is the need for radically progressive tax reform. Far from paying their fair share, McKee says that "corporations are stealing public money."

The Conservatives, of course, are calling for tax cuts cuts. McKee says the Liberals are not even talking about the issue. Meanwhile the NDP advocates for a tiny 1.5% increase in corporate taxes and talks about how this would remain "competitive" with Trump's new rates. For McKee this is the NDP putting "fiscal responsibility and capitalist competition ahead of the needs of the working class."

Tax cuts since the Harris era, the Communist Party relates in its leaflet, have cost the government of Ontario $18 billion in annual revenue. The party proposes to reverse this by "doubling the corporate tax rate and reversing tax cuts to the very wealthy." McKee emphasized the importance of this by saying that "we have to resolve the revenue crisis" in Ontario.

As for any attempt by corporations to refuse to pay, McKee says that "If the corporations don't pay we will take them under public ownership."

McKee talked as well about other aspects of the party platform including their commitment to fare free transit, ending public funding of Catholic schools, justice for Indigenous Peoples, a socialist approach to environmental justice, and fighting for the equality rights of women and people from racialized and LGBTQI2S communities.

While he said this in reference to health care, I think he summed up many aspects of the Communist platform more broadly very well when saying "It's just about treating people with dignity."

He also touched on the need to build a mass movement and alliance to fight against Ford and the deep cuts and attacks that we can anticipate should he become Premier. He noted that the Communist electoral campaign and the issues it is raising is a part of that saying "We are campaigning for June 8, June 9, and on" 

The speech ended with an inspiring call to "ignite the movement for socialism", one of the party's election slogans.

The Communist Party is running 12 candidates province wide all listed below:

The full Communist Party leaflet is reproduced here:

To find out more about their campaign visit their website or Facebook group.

See also: Deep ennui greets launch of an Ontario election that is Ford's to lose

Deep ennui greets launch of an Ontario election that is Ford's to lose

With all of the major party leaders having come off a largely anemic and uninteresting television debate in Toronto, the Ontario provincial election has now officially begun.

While it is shaping up to be an election as much about the leader of the opposition as about the Premier, what is very telling is just how totally unenthusiastic many Ontarians are about the choices facing them. A poll released today found that fully "74 per cent of voters across all parties wish there was another option other than Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, PC Leader Doug Ford and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.".

74 per cent.

Admittedly the poll is somewhat disingenuous as there are, in fact, other options on both the right and the left, but setting that aside it is still a startling result.

While New Democrats have been pushing the narrative that Andrea Horwath is the most "popular" leader this seems to be only by default:

Pollster Darrell Bricker said while Horwath has an advantage on the favourability front, it’s more “neutral” since the other two have fairly high negative favourability.
“Andrea Horwath comes up better because she’s less disagreeable, not because she’s so much more likeable,” Bricker explained.

Despite attempts in some quarters to claim that the NDP has shifted back more to the "left"-- with an allegedly exciting, popular platform -- it would seem that the public is as yet failing to see great differences between the Liberals and the NDP.

For the NDP there is an obvious opportunity to gain traction with a Premier whose unpopularity remains at historic levels and with the leadership of Doug Ford terrifying to many voters. So far, though, the progressive vote has yet to consolidate behind either the Liberals or the NDP. The CBC poll tracker (as of May 8) has the two parties at virtually identical levels of support with 26 per cent each.

This likely has a lot to do with the fact that little fundamentally separates the two parties, regardless of what the partisans may say. The very fact that this is open to question shows this. Both collaborated together during the Liberal austerity budgets of 2012 and 2013, both ran very centrist campaigns in 2014 and both have tried to come out with competing big progressive announcements in recent months.

The Liberals brought in a much higher minimum wage and the most sweeping labour law reforms in a generation last year. The NDP and the Liberals both have deeply flawed "pharmacare" plans, though the Liberal OHIP+ plan is actually in place. The NDP's dental care plan is clearly more comprehensive though their childcare plan is not free and lacks the universality of the Liberal plan. That it would apply to all children eventually as opposed to those only between the ages of 2 1/2 and kindergarten hardly compensates for that. Means tested childcare would be an entrenched and more regressive vision of "affordable" childcare than an age-based free and universal one that can be expanded later.

Where the NDP has staked out turf that more solidly differentiates them is when it comes to opposing further privatization and calling for Hydro One to be brought back into public hands as well as in calling for some minor increases in taxes on the wealthy.

The NDP's potential advantage lies with the fact that their plans are unencumbered by a profoundly unpopular leader, the voter fatigue that comes from having been in power for 15 years and the whiff of corruption that hangs around the Liberals. Whether or not Horwath can make real inroads based on this remains to be seen.

Doug Ford unquestionably poses a serious threat but he also has benefited greatly from a very unusual political moment.

In this era of truncated narratives which of the two bourgeois progressive parties will emerge as the primary opponent of Ford, if either of them do, will depend on a number of variables -- including how the inevitable calls for "strategic voting" play out -- that are hard to predict though any momentum would appear to be with the NDP out of the gate.

The deep ennui that exists among the public is quite understandable though and stems from the broad, and broadly correct, assumption that any alternative to the highly destructive Ford agenda that has any chance of getting elected in June differs the one from the other far less than they would have you believe.

This fact is part of what makes the rhetorically populist change offered by Ford so nominally appealing in the circumstances even to many to whom it would bring great harm.

The Left Chapter will be offering ongoing analysis of the upcoming Ontario provincial election including an upcoming weekly round-up of news and developments. 

Further Readings:

Doug Ford wants you to subsidize the poverty wages of corporations

For Ford fact and policy free is the way to go

Horwath's campaign announcement a failure to differentiate for the ONDP

Ten myth-busting articles about the minimum wage in Ontario