{"id":37813,"date":"2017-03-24T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T09:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37813"},"modified":"2017-03-23T21:38:43","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T01:38:43","slug":"kathleen-wynne-the-ontario-liberal-partys-saviour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/03\/24\/kathleen-wynne-the-ontario-liberal-partys-saviour\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Wynne … the Ontario Liberal Party’s saviour?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley<\/a> tries to position Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne as being the greatest asset of the Liberal Party:<\/p>\n

The question of Kathleen Wynne\u2019s future as leader of the Ontario Liberal Party made its way to the public airwaves this week in the form a panel discussion on TVO\u2019s The Agenda. Host Steve Paikin asked former Liberal MP Greg Sorbara what advice he would offer the premier, and his response caused a bit of a stir.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is extremely unlikely that you\u2019ll win the next election. The facts are the facts,\u201d he said he would tell her. \u201cI have not seen a party in the last year of its mandate turn (poll) numbers around when they are as bad as (the Liberals\u2019) are.\u201d And he noted the numbers are \u201cparticularly bad\u201d for Wynne personally.<\/p>\n

The latest Mainstreet Research\/Postmedia poll, released last week, had the Liberals at 22-per-cent support, 10 points behind the Tories. Forum Research last measured Wynne\u2019s approval rating at 11 per cent, and her disapproval rating at 77 per cent. Just nine per cent said she would make the best premier of the three party leaders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, so where does Wynn come off as the Liberals’ best hope?<\/p>\n

If Liberals are worried \u201cit\u2019s all over,\u201d as Sorbara put it, I would submit it\u2019s in large part because, on election day 2018, they\u2019ll have been in power for 15 and a half not very impressive years. That\u2019s the longest streak in Ontario in three decades. No party has managed it federally since St. Laurent took over from Mackenzie King.<\/p>\n

Stuff builds up.<\/p>\n

Stuff like, you know, Dalton McGuinty promising in writing not to raise taxes, then instituting a \u201chealth premium,\u201d which he claimed wasn\u2019t a tax, and then admitting under duress that it was a tax; like lottery retailers defrauding players to the tune of $100 million, and casinos managing to lose money; like allowing Ornge to spin out of control into corruption, mismanagement and overspending; like the electronic health records debacle; like turning a blind eye while native protesters illegally occupied Caledonia; like flushing a billion dollars or so down the john to cancel gas plants sooner than risk voters\u2019 ire, then claiming there\u2019s \u201cno wrong time to make the right decision;\u201d like various apparatchiks winding up arrested for little things like bribery and conspiring to delete government emails; like taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies that benefit from government largesse, shamelessly demanding cash for access to ministers, and only changing the rules when it finally became politically untenable; like a debt-to-GDP ratio that grew 40 per cent, from third-lowest among the provinces to fourth-highest; and like astronomical hydro bills born to a significant degree of bad political decisions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of that, and yet Wynne somehow managed to get a majority government last time around. Ontario’s masochistic voters clearly do deserve to get it, as Mencken said, “good and hard”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley tries to position Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne as being the greatest asset of the Liberal Party: The question of Kathleen Wynne\u2019s future as leader of the Ontario Liberal Party made its way to the public airwaves this week in the form a panel discussion on TVO\u2019s The Agenda. Host Steve Paikin asked former […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"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":[6,53],"tags":[188,957,908,87,289],"class_list":["post-37813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-kathleenwynne","tag-liberalparty","tag-ontario","tag-polls"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9PT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37813","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=37813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37814,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37813\/revisions\/37814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}