Premier Wynne has thrown in the towel....sort of. To paraphrase..."It's not about me...it's about the children!!!"
To quote her...."Even though I won't be leading this province as premier, I care deeply about how it will be led..." She then went on urge people to vote Liberal in an effort to deny either the PCs or the NDP a majority government.
I have watched politics closely for what must be 35 years. I have never seen anything quite like this.
The job of political leaders is to lead, and what this has always meant was that even in the face of adversity true leaders push boldly ahead, confident in what they have to offer and hopeful that voters will agree. This is what their party members expect and deserve.
I worked for the federal PCs in 1993...we did not concede before the vote, because whether or not we ended up conceding was an issue for the voters, not for us. To concede before the vote would have shown utter contempt for the electorate. It would have been as if we thought we were free to decide the outcome of the election, not the people who are supposedly sovereign.
But did Wynne actually concede? Or did she merely state the obvious, which is now reflected in the polls have her way behind. What is she really doing?
Her "concession" was an almost unbelievably crass ploy to keep party status, in order to position her party to return to power once a minority government - whether NDP or PC, is irrelevant - falls early in the next mandate.
For Wynne, what matters is power. The only government she cares about is her own.
This is reflected in her attitude to her time in power. Wynne's government is essentially perfect. Throughout this campaign and even before the campaign, Wynne has admitted to exactly no errors while in office - nothing - not the gas plant scandal, not e-health, not the catastrophe that is hydro in Ontario, not the crisis that is the state of public finance. You maintain the fantasy of perfection if your forever goal is perpetual power.
Even in her concession statement, driven by her horrible performance in public opinion polls, she said this, "People want change, but by and large they're confident about where Ontario stands and where Ontario is headed. For this reason — I heard this over and over again — many voters are worried about handing a blank cheque to either Doug Ford or the NDP." Um, no. When people are confident with where things are headed, the party in power usually polls above 20%!
Wynne isn't the problem - she is merely symptomatic of a bigger problem. The fact is that the political class in this province is deeply diseased. All politicians of all stripes now regularly put their short term interests of their parties ahead of the long term interests of the province. This is their essential betrayal.
That Wynne is manipulating voters in this campaign with a view to positioning her party for the next one would be completely understandable to anyone in the PCs or the NDP. None of them are talking about the implications of Wynne's gambit for democracy in Ontario - that this crass game playing is an affront to all voters - because they would likely do the same thing if they were in the same position.
Even an Ontario voter has a breaking point. The next election will see the rise of at least one new party that will sweep many of these game players aside.
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