{"id":11540,"date":"2011-10-09T13:07:48","date_gmt":"2011-10-09T17:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11540"},"modified":"2011-10-09T13:07:48","modified_gmt":"2011-10-09T17:07:48","slug":"matt-gurney-even-the-media-were-bored-by-the-ontario-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/10\/09\/matt-gurney-even-the-media-were-bored-by-the-ontario-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Gurney: Even the media were bored by the Ontario election"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you find the recent Ontario election a big snore-fest? You’re not alone. So did the journalists<\/a> covering the “festivities”:<\/p>\n

\n

Ontario politics is a bit dull at the best of times, but that\u2019s unfortunate. It\u2019s a large, populous province, with the economy to match. It\u2019s troubled now, battered and bruised from years of mismanagement and the global economic crisis, but it\u2019s still the centre of Canada\u2019s economic gravity. Ontario needs to do well.<\/p>\n

And yet, even by the usual standards for snooze-inducing Ontario partisanship, last week\u2019s election was lame. The Liberals, under Dalton McGuinty, essentially breezed through it, never saying much. Whenever a punch was thrown — and not many were — they seemed to just bounce off the inexplicable forcefield that somehow protects Mr. McGuinty from consequences for his electoral missteps. The Tim Hudak-led PCs made the mistake of thinking that Ontarians were eager to vote them into power, and then ran a tone-deaf campaign that was only notable for its costly mistakes. The proof of that is found in the exit polling data: The Tories focused obsessively on Dalton McGuinty\u2019s record of tax hikes, branding him \u201cthe Tax Man.\u201d But only 15% of Ontario\u2019s voters identified that as their main worry, meaning that the PCs\u2019 biggest ad buy missed 85% of the electorate. And the NDP, under Andrew Horwath, mainly offered ridiculous suggestions like protectionist Buy Ontario legislation and arbitrarily freezing some consumer prices for purely political purposes. Outside of northern Ontario, not a lot of people think that\u2019ll do much good.<\/p>\n

The voter turnout reflected that: It\u2019s estimated right now to have been roughly 49%, less than half of eligible voters. There\u2019s cause to fret about that, and wonder what\u2019s to be done, but for now, let\u2019s just accept that rather than a sign that our democracy is broken, or doomed, it\u2019s really what Rex Murphy said it was in his Saturday column — a deliberate rebuke of all the parties by a frustrated, insulted electorate. A pox on all their houses, as it were. If so, there was some early warning that that would be the case — even the journalists whose job it is to muster up excitement for politics had a hard time concealing their displeasure during this campaign.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I found it interesting that one of the most popular posts I’ve put up in the last several months was the one about how to refuse your ballot<\/a> under Ontario’s election law. That’s certainly an indication of the relative level of voter disenchantment with the candidates and parties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did you find the recent Ontario election a big snore-fest? You’re not alone. So did the journalists covering the “festivities”: Ontario politics is a bit dull at the best of times, but that\u2019s unfortunate. It\u2019s a large, populous province, with the economy to match. It\u2019s troubled now, battered and bruised from years of mismanagement and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,28,53],"tags":[584,188,87,739],"class_list":["post-11540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-media","category-politics","tag-daltonmcguinty","tag-electionwatch","tag-ontario","tag-timhudak"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-308","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11541,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11540\/revisions\/11541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}