Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2012

Reputations take years to create, but can be destroyed overnight as Toronto Police have discovered

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Chris Selley on how the Toronto G20 protest and the still amazingly bad police response has contributed to the decline in public support for all police organizations:

On July 6, 2010, 10 days after the disastrous G20 summit, Toronto’s City Council voted to “commend the outstanding work of [police] chief Bill Blair, the Toronto Police Service and the police officers working during the G20 Summit in Toronto,” and thank them for a “job well done.” The vote was 36-0. The yeas included then-Mayor David Miller and many other left-wing luminaries. At this point in the G20 post-mortem, this seems a bit hard to believe.

We know much more now about how poorly the security operation was planned and executed: This week’s report from Gerry McNeilly, director of Ontario’s Office of the Independent Police Review, lays it out in painstaking detail. But what we knew 10 days later was bad enough: Thugs had wreaked havoc at will; 400 borderline-hypothermic people were held for hours in the pouring rain for no good reason; police cars were burned; journalists were roughed up and arrested; untold numbers of people were randomly and improperly searched and arrested.

Yet no one on a decidedly left-leaning Council saw fit to vote against the absurd “job well done” commendation (though then-councillor Rob Ford, now Mayor, did complain that the police had been too nice). One has to wonder how much longer politicians’ traditional lockstep support for police is going to last last.

[. . .]

People still call the police in hope of honest and brave assistance, and they almost always get it. But in late March, Angus-Reid asked Canadians how much “confidence [they] have in the internal operations and leadership” of their police forces. A minority of 38% had “complete” or “a lot of” confidence in the RCMP. The number for municipal police forces, taken together, was 39%. That’s about half of what it was in the mid-1990s. The respective numbers in B.C. are below 30%.

If that’s not a credibility crisis, I don’t know what is. Politicians are generally not in the habit of blindly supporting entities with those kinds of approval ratings, and police ought to be worried about that for all kinds of reasons. One of the obvious keys to fixing the problem is, simply, accountability. And it is nowhere to be found — not from the officers who witnessed fellow officers’ misdeeds, not from the commanders, not from Chief Blair, and not from the federal politicians who foisted this debacle on an unprepared and unsuitable city.

At the bottom of this post you can find a litany of complaints about the police handling of the Toronto G20 protests.

May 3, 2012

Sarkozy’s best chance to win? The DSK effect

Filed under: Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

John Gizzi on the slim hopes Nicolas Sarkozy has to catch up to front-runner Francois Hollande in the French presidential election:

Before arriving here today to find France braced for its presidential election run-off May 6, I stopped at London’s Ladbroke’s, the world’s most storied of oddsmakers. The odds against Nicolas Sarkozy winning, the bookmaker told me, were 4-to-1, while the odds favoring Socialist challenger Francois Hollande were 1-to-7.

[. . .]

With those chunks of LePen and Bayrou voters, Sarkozy would be in a near-tie with his Socialist nemesis and would need some dramatic event or stumble by Hollande to put him over. As to what this stumble might be, one possibility could have occurred at a birthday party for Socialist politician Julian Drey last Sunday. The big news was who showed up: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose own presidential hopes were dashed in a sensational string of scandals beginning with his arrest in New York last May for allegedly assaulting a hotel maid. The politician known as DSK dodged that bullet, but is now facing more serious charges of his alleged involvement in a prostitution ring in France.

Upon learning that DSK was at the birthday party, 2007 Socialist nominee Segolene Royal (who is the mother of Hollande’s four children) stormed out and Hollande himself canceled an appearance at the party. Incredibly, the party was held at the site of what was once a notorious house of prostitution.

Just the appearance of Strauss-Kahn sent the Hollande camp into fervent denials that DSK would ever be considered for a position in a Socialist government.

April 27, 2012

Colby Cosh on the Alberta election results versus the pollsters

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Most of the national press live and work in either Ottawa or Toronto. Neither location is a good vantage point for figuring out what is happening in the rest of the country:

One point three. Twelve. Fourteen. Seventeen. Eight, seven, seven, six, eight, seven, ten, nine, nine . . . two.

That’s a word picture of the polls taken in the run-up to April 23’s Alberta election, starting with a Leger survey for which interviews took place April 5-8. The numbers represent the Wildrose party’s estimated province-wide lead over the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. No public poll taken by a respectable firm during the campaign had the Wildrose behind the PCs. All pollsters agreed that at least a narrow Wildrose majority government was likely. Reporters in Eastern Canada dutifully filed “Wildrose wins” copy for the April 24 morning papers, believing that the outcome was certain.

And then came the shocking result of the election itself, arriving at the end of the mathematical sequence like some indecipherable symbol from a lost language:

Minus nine point six.

April 24, 2012

Colby Cosh on the “Alberta surprise”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

From his most recent column at Maclean’s:

An Alberta astronaut returning from Titan and seeing the result of last night’s election would say “Meh, so what else is new? The PCs carried 61 of 87 seats? Kind of an off year for them, I guess.” Yet the ostensibly boring, familiar outcome wrong-footed much of the media and absolutely all the pollsters. Even PC insiders, correctly detecting a last-minute shift away from the Wildrose Party heirs-presumptive, envisioned a much smaller vote share than the 44 per cent Alison Redford’s party achieved. The public polling firms all botched the job, with none forecasting anything but a Wildrose majority even on the final weekend.

The Wildrose Party’s final count of 17 seats must surely leave its braintrust, heavily stocked with Conservative Party of Canada veterans, obliterated with horror. The CPC has built a pretty good electoral machine, but as old Ralph Klein hand and Wildrose supporter Rod Love reminded CBC, the Alberta PC brand is the most successful in the country. He probably could have gone even further afield if he wanted to. (On August 24, 2014, the PCs will officially become the longest continuously serving government in the annals of Confederation.) In 1993 the PCs were in trouble late, but succeeded in outflanking a popular Liberal opposition and running against their own record. They did it again in 2012. Redford succeeded in making herself the “change” candidate — though not without help from the Wildrose insurgents, who suffered late “bozo eruptions” of the sort the CPC itself has long since succeeded in extinguishing.

Update: Even Colby can’t seem to avoid the “Ten things” meme:

1. Proportional representation just won itself a whole passel of new right-wing fans.

2. Alberta Liberal morale remained high throughout an election in which pollsters warned continually of disaster. And the pollsters proved to be almost exactly right about this (if nothing else). Yet even as the mortifying results rolled in, Alberta Liberal morale still remained high. Then their egomaniac not-really-Liberal disaster of a leader, Raj Sherman, won his seat by the skin of his teeth. This means he will not have to be replaced unless an awful lot of people smarten up fast. Alberta Liberal morale after this event? Easily, easily at its highest point in ten years. “Please, sir, may I have another?”

[. . .]

5. Those who did boycott the Senate election seem awfully proud of themselves, because it was a “meaningless” election. Why, one wonders, does it have to be meaningless? The “progressive” parties could have agreed on a single Senate candidate in advance; if they had done so, that candidate would certainly have ended up first in the queue, and provided an excellent test of Stephen Harper’s integrity, which I am told is much doubted.

The problem is that Harper might pass the test, you say? Then what’s the harm? You get some smart, popular left-wing independent speaking for Alberta in the Senate? That’s bad for “progressives” how?

I’m still waiting for the definitive post-election analysis of why all the polls were so far off: I didn’t see a single poll in the last two weeks of the election that didn’t have Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party in clear majority territory. Nobody was predicting another PC victory in that time period (or if they were, the national media wasn’t picking it up).

April 21, 2012

“Alberta appears headed for its fourth change of government in its 107-year history”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton Sun on the last public opinion poll numbers before Monday’s election:

Alberta appears headed for its fourth change of government in its 107-year history. The Tories’ 41-year rule seems set to end on Monday.

Wildrose still leads the Tories by 10 points, 41% to 31%.

Wildrose has fallen five points since last week – not surprising, perhaps, given the battering the party took early in the week when two of its candidates badly fumbled issues of gay rights and racism.

What is perhaps surprising, though, is that the Tories have not been the only beneficiaries of Wildrose’s tough week. While Premier Alison Redford and crew rose two percentage points between Week 3 and Week 4, so too did the Alberta Liberals under Raj Sherman. The NDP under Brian Mason also climbed a point.

April 12, 2012

QotD: Atheists in America

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

This ongoing conflict between sectarianism and secularism is the raison d’etre for a non-theist movement, and it is why categorical disrespect for godlessness matters. The assumption that religious belief is essential to morality advances mistrust of secular governance. Of course, religious people have a right to their biases, and the irreligious have a right to challenge them. Non-theists can always voice their opinions individually, but, like other ideological and demographic minorities, they need a movement to amplify their voices. And regardless of their individual psychic needs for recognition (which do not interest me), non-theists have a collective political need for a movement that encourages openness about disbelief: The more godlessness is normalised, the less it will seem inherently immoral, the more likely the perspectives of non-theists will be considered, instead of reflexively condemned.

What should they bring to the church/state debates? As a small, disrespected, irreligious minority, non-theists should appreciate freedom of conscience. Non-theism is often associated with hostility toward religion, thanks partly to the prominence of a few ‘New Atheists’, but it can and should promote respect for religious liberty. People who believe in no religions are not apt to privilege any one of them: evangelicals tend to be wary of Mormonism, as the Republican primaries have demonstrated, but to an atheist or agnostic, belief in the resurrection is no more or less worthy of respect than belief in the Angel Moroni.

Scepticism is a great leveller; it favours extending equal speech and religious rights to all orthodoxies, which is the essence of civil liberty. Freedom of conscience doesn’t distinguish between new, outré religions derided as cults and traditional mainstream faiths, as former American Civil Liberties Union executive director Ira Glasser tried explaining to an interviewer years ago. He was asked about the chanting, saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, who commanded little popular respect. They were ‘weird’, the interviewer remarked to Glasser. ‘I don’t know’, he replied. ‘Have you taken a look at the College of Cardinals?’

Wendy Kaminer “In America, atheists are still in the closet”, Spiked!, 2012-04-11

January 4, 2012

After a hopeful week, a disappointing finish in Iowa

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Brian Doherty was covering the Iowa Caucuses for Hit & Run:

As you saw below here on Hit and Run, despite some pretty widespread hope and anticipation from both the media (a week ago and earlier tonight) and a lot of his eager fans and grassroots volunteers (until late tonight), Ron Paul failed to win, or even come in second. This was not, it seems (at least the failure to win part) a huge surprise to more higher-level campaign staff.

As a Ron Paul admirer since 1988, having the sweet hope of victory held over my head for a moment led to a frustrating and dispiriting night. But — while all discussions of “moods of the room” are suspect, based, as they must be, on long talks with what by necessity will be a narrow unscientific sampling of the room — I seemed to be perhaps the most bummed person at the Paul “victory party.” Even the many Iowans who started today expecting a win are still satisfied and eager footsoldiers in an ongoing Ron Paul Revolution.

Before the results poured in, I sat in on the caucus process in Precinct 5 in Ankeny, held in a high school gym about a mile from Paul’s state HQ. More than 200 people showed up. I didn’t stay long enough to see the official count. But the GOP precinct organizer — Ron Paul supporter Ross Witt — had the various candidates’ fans bunch up in separate parts of the gym to pick their spokespeople, vote watchers, and potential delegate candidates. When that happened, Paul’s crowd was the largest (and contained the only African-American in the room).

While I was sorry to see Ron Paul not win, I was much more alarmed at who came in second a bare handful of votes behind Romney. Santorum’s surge (yes, I know . . . “that’s disgusting”) puts the most authoritarian candidate back into the race in a big way. It might have been “Anyone But Romney” up to now, but I’d far prefer Romney get the nomination than quasi-totalitarian Santorum.

Yesterday on Twitter, there was a brief attempt to add a new disqualifier to Santorum’s name (aside from Dan Savage’s anal sex neologism) by tagging lots of Santorum-mentions with the hashtag #sexdungeon. It was amusing, but I suspect the folks who are most likely to vote for Santorum don’t have Twitter accounts.

December 21, 2011

Panic in Iowa

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Panic, at least, for the Republican establishment who are facing a full-scale Paulista Revolutionary outbreak:

    What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, ‘What do you think about Dr. Paul?’ These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30- and 60-second ads. If you ask Iowans if they’re for legalizing marijuana or legalizing heroin, they’d say no. But Dr. Paul has said on many occasions that that’s OK. But people don’t all know that.

I’m not sure whether to be delighted or depressed by the reaction of Iowa Republicans like Andy Cable to the suddenly-real possibility that Ron Paul might win — and thereby discredit! — the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses. The anomalous importance of Iowa within the U.S. election system has traditionally been defended on two major grounds: (a), that the state is pretty representative of the American “middle” in both geographic and demographic senses, and (b), that a small state like Iowa (or New Hampshire) can scrutinize candidates with a salutary close-up intensity, given a long pre-election period in which to do it.

There is no doubt something to these arguments. (Along with obvious rebuttals to both.) But how can a major party have its cake and eat it too? Specifically, how can the concept of Iowa’s special mission as a testing range for candidates be reconciled with Mr. Cable’s panicky Yuletide talk of uninformed goon voters flying off the handle? Cable’s state has benefited significantly from being a political bellwether, both from the quadrennial media activity and attention and from the political pork that follows. (Ethanol accounts for 9% of the state’s GDP.) Yet Cable is not even waiting for Paul to be nominated before undermining the whole basis for taking Iowa seriously.

December 20, 2011

The kind of folks who make up the bulk of the “Occupy” movement

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:49

Charles Cooke reports on a recent study of the membership of the “Occupy” groups:

The report, Shortselling America, reveals that, below the surface, there is a lot more going on than meets the eye, and most of it has very little to do with “social justice.” Its author, Frontier Lab takes an interesting approach, applying techniques of market research to political science. The group’s aim is to move away from the short-term model employed by political pollsters — which, although valuable, essentially provides just a fleeting snapshot — and instead to conduct a more thorough assessment of participants’ values. From these data, they then seek to predict future behavior. An example: Surface-level polling will see consumers tell us that the reason they buy a particular dish soap is because it is green, or cheap, or conveniently sized. But research shows the deeper truth is that, overwhelmingly, people buy the same brand as their mother did. (Nobody will write that on a survey.)

What did Frontier Lab discover? First, that many of the rank-and-file occupiers feel isolated in their lives, and appear to lack basic community ties such as are provided by participation in clubs, churches, and strong families. Indeed, much of the report could have come from the early chapters of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. They thus attach to their political causes with something like a religious fervor. For many, a commitment to “social justice” is “not the end, but rather a means to an inflated sense of self and purpose in their own lives.” Crucially, involvement with others who agree with them provides an “overwhelming feeling of being part of a family.” I noticed this on my first trip down to Zuccotti Park, when I saw a telling sign adorning the entrance to the tent city: “For the first time in my life, I feel at home.” On subsequent visits I was struck by the importance of the commune to the project. As much as anything else, vast swathes of occupiers were simply looking for a new club. This group, Frontier Lab dubs the “Communitarians.”

The second group, which to all intents and purposes forms the leadership, is less existentially lost, and derives its fulfillment from the “prestige,” “validation,” and “control” afforded by the movement’s coverage in the media. Frontier Lab calls this group the “Professionals.” Its members fill the ranks of the professional Left and boast long histories of attending and organizing protests. For them, indignation is quotidian, “community action” is a career, and they feel “validated by the fame and attention” and “rewarded for their life choices.” Unlike the Communitarians, the Professionals actually want tangible change, or a “win,” but politics is still playing second fiddle to self. There is nothing spontaneous or organic about the movements they lead. They are waiting for the revolution and hope to be in its vanguard. Their careers depend upon it.

H/T to Ace, who added this post-script to the quote: “Testing on the Myers-Briggs personality profile consistently put the rank-and-file in the Stunted Weakling category, and the leadership in the Gigantic Colossal Douchebag group”

December 15, 2011

Gary Johnson’s GOP Catch-22 forces him out of the race

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:33

The difficulty of running for the GOP nomination is made that much harder if you don’t already have a lot of name recognition. Being the successful governor of a small state isn’t enough to get your name known, and the GOP’s party officials have concocted a lovely Catch-22 to prevent unknowns from breaking into the race: you can only be in the debates if you’re doing well in the polls, and you can only be in the polls if we decide you should be.

As a result of being frozen out of the race, Governor Gary Johnson is leaving the GOP and will seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination instead:

Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson has been “hung out to dry” by the GOP establishment and that is the reason he is likely to leave the party and run for the presidency as a libertarian, he says.

The former New Mexico governor tells Newsmax.TV he has faced a Catch-22 situation because his name has not appeared in the opinion polls that decide whether he has enough support to get him a place in the party’s debates, which means he has not been able to gain the exposure that could have lifted him in the polls.

[. . .]

Johnson, who describes himself as fiscally conservative but socially liberal, is due in New York on Thursday and he is expected to announce formally that he is joining the Libertarian Party.

He has never managed to gain traction in the run-up to the Republican primary season. He says time is running out because of “sore loser laws” in some states that say a candidate cannot run in primaries and then stand on a different ticket in the general election.

October 20, 2011

Polls indicate 50% of Americans now support legalizing marijuana

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Cue all the “what are they smoking?” jokes:

Once in office, Jimmy Carter didn’t abandon his temperate approach to cannabis. He proposed that the federal government stop treating possession of small amounts as a crime, making a sensible but novel argument: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

Nothing came of it, of course. Carter’s logic was unassailable even 35 years ago, but it has yet to be translated into federal policy. The American experience with prohibition of alcohol proved that we are capable of learning from our mistakes. The experience with prohibition of marijuana proves that we are also capable of doing just the opposite.

The stupidity and futility of the federal war on weed, however, has slowly permeated the mass consciousness. This week, the Gallup organization reported that fully 50 percent of Americans now think marijuana should be made legal. This is the first time since Gallup began asking in 1969 that more Americans support legalization than oppose it.

[. . .]

Over the past 30 years, federal spending to fight drugs has risen seven times over, after inflation. Since 1991, arrests for possession of pot have nearly tripled. But all for naught.

As a report last year by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy noted, more high school students and young adults get high today than 20 years ago. More than 16 million Americans smoke dope at least once a month. Pot is just as available to kids as it ever was, and cheaper than before.

If we had gotten results like this after reducing enforcement, the new policy would be blamed. But politicians who support the drug war never consider that their remedies may be aggravating the disease. They follow the customary formula for government programs: If it works, spend more on it, and if it fails, spend more on it.

October 7, 2011

Expect to hear a lot of “analysis” from the Voter Turnout Nerds

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Colby Cosh gets in a pre-emptive strike against the folks for whom 100% voter participation is the only worthy result:

Get ready for the Voter Turnout Nerds: you’ll be hearing from them today. Oh yes. It would not be like them to stay silent after an Ontario election in which fewer than half of technically eligible voters appear to have cast a ballot. The Turnout Nerds don’t care who won or who lost: they care about the mathematical purity of the electoral exercise. They’ll be everywhere you look in the media, ready with their diagnoses and their nostrums and, most of all, their disapproval.

It’s not the people who have let us down, they’ll tell us; it’s the government that has let the people down, fostering apathy (most heinous of all political sins) by failing to implement Brilliant Idea X or Salutary Scheme Y. But at what point do the people, apparently so deaf to the allure of electoral reforms and renovations, stop believing the Turnout Nerd’s comforting assurances of goodwill? Nothing seems to raise the holy quantity of Turnout very effectively. Any momentary rise seems to be followed by a more precipitate plunge. Are the electorate and the Turnout Nerds headed toward a frightful mutual collision with terrible truths about democracy?

October 5, 2011

Ontario election: pick a poll, any poll

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Nobody knows what the result of Ontario’s election tomorrow will be . . . and the polls are even less effective than usual because they all report significantly different outcomes:

The latest poll by Angus Reid for the Toronto Star has the Tories ahead of the Liberals by three points, at 36 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively. The NDP has 26 per cent public support.

However, an Abacus survey for the Toronto Sun has the Liberals ahead by the same three-point margin, with the NDP at 24 per cent.

Both these numbers suggest a minority government for either party.

But, the Ipsos poll released Tuesday night show the Liberals heading for a majority, with a 10 point lead at 41 per cent. The Tories are at 31 per cent and NDP at 25 per cent.

Ipsos vice-president John Wright told 680News this poll could mean McGuinty will be heading back to Queen’s Park with a majority of seats.

The only consistent result is showing the NDP peaking at 25-26%, which may indicate the “halo effect” from the last federal election (where the NDP made impressive gains to become the official opposition) and the subsequent death of federal NDP leader Jack Layton.

Update: Kelly McParland offers an explanation for not just the current schizophrenia in the polls, but the entire election narrative:

No wonder voters are confused (or uncaring, which is more likely the case). If the MSM can’t make up its mind, how are mere voters supposed to, especially having paid the campaign no attention at all, other than by turning down the sound when some of the more offensive union-financed-but-not officially-supporting-McGuinty TV ads popped up. Personally I think the fault lies not with the electorate, which has had to vote in so many elections since 2006 that it can barely keep track of which party is breaking its promises any more, but with pundits, and especially with the Official Narrative, which was sent out from Pundit Headquarters in the midst of the summer doldrums, when most of the Ottawa pundits were either dozing in the backyard while pretending to work, or lazing at the cottage, where BlackBerry reception can be spotty. Some Ottawa golf courses also frown on the use of BlackBerries on the premises, which can add to the difficulty. Ottawa in the summer goes into a semi-permanent snooze, unlike Washington, where the war on one another never stops.

Having missed or misread the Official Narrative, pundits continued to insist that Tim Hudak was winning the race, when in fact there was no race. To have a race, you have to have voters who care in the slightest, which no one in Ontario did. This misconception arose because pundits continued to receive polls suggesting the Conservative leader was wiping the floor with the Liberals, and treated them seriously. Mr. Hudak was reported to be 10 or 20 points ahead. Big mistake. At the best of times, polls should be held with no more than two fingers at a time, and well away from the body. Polls taken during the summer, weeks before the official campaign has been declared, should be sprayed first with disinfectant, then deleted unread. I suspect Mr. Hudak never really had the lead he was given credit for, which made it inevitable that when the imaginary bulge suddenly disappeared, he would be blamed for frittering it away. Mr. McGuinty is now being hailed as a genius of the hustings, having somehow resurrected his party even as Ontarians continue trying to figure out how he got the job in the first place. This is being called “momentum.”

October 4, 2011

Ottawa Citizen: “The election was Tim Hudak’s to lose and he appears to have done so”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Just a few short months ago, the Progressive Conservatives were so far ahead in the polls that holding an election seemed like a mere formality. How times change. Tim Hudak may still have a mathematical chance to lead his party into government in this week’s Ontario election, but even if he does, it’ll be a bare minority based on current polls. After a series of cringe-inducing announcements before the campaign (chain gangs? really?), the blame lies directly on Hudak and his team who decided that after all this time Ontario really just wanted another Dalton McGuinty.

The Ottawa Citizen suggests that voters should hold their noses and vote Liberal:

When Ontario voters mark their ballots on Thursday, many will be holding their noses with their other hands. There is no clear choice for who should lead this province into what will likely be an economically very difficult four years.

The election was Tim Hudak’s to lose and he appears to have done so. In July, his Progressive Conservatives were polling well in majority territory. Hudak, himself, was a pleasant surprise. He is composed and confident in person. On meeting Hudak in August, this editorial board was convinced McGuinty was in serious trouble. Hudak was clearly able to give voice to the frustration of the electorate with eight years of Liberal rule. But he needed to do more than that. He needed to offer Ontarians an alternative.

In most major policy areas there’s little to distinguish the PC platform from the Liberals’. They would raise health care and education funding by identical amounts and trim public spending in other areas to a similar degree.

For those of you who choose not to hold your noses at the polling station, if you don’t have an acceptable candidate in your riding you can still decline your ballot.

August 16, 2011

Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives living down to expectations

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

As I’ve said before, Tim Hudak is doing everything he possibly can to keep Dalton McGuinty’s chances of re-election alive. The polls now show just how well that’s working out:

Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty and his Progressive Conservative rival Tim Hudak are locked in a statistical tie as Ontario gears up to elect a new premier, a new poll suggests.

Both Hudak and McGuinty have the support of about 30 per cent of voters, less than two months before the October election, according to the Nanos Research poll.

The poll, conducted for CTV, the Globe and Mail and CP24, asked 1,000 Ontarians of voting age who “would make the best premier of Ontario?”

McGuinty had 30.3 per cent support while Hudak had 28.7 per cent of support. Since the difference is within the margin of error for the poll, the two leaders are locked in a close race.

Meanwhile, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath trails the frontrunners with 12.2 per cent support, and 14.6 per cent of voters are undecided.

Additionally, 11 per cent of voters say none of the provincial leaders would make the best premier.

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