Why Ontario is poised to become Canada’s Greece

By the editors - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 99 Comments

Frank Gunn/CP

October has been an unusually busy month for provincial politics.

Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, Manitoba, Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Yukon have all had elections in the past two weeks. Alberta’s ruling Progressive Conservatives recently picked a new premier in Alison Redford. And next month Saskatchewan will head to the polls. While every election is important, one in particular should give all Canadians pause for thought.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s re-election last week, albeit with a minority, was an impressive display of campaigning. And yet what makes McGuinty’s return significant is not his politicking skill but his responsibility for Ontario’s ever-expanding debt. Traditionally known as the engine that drives Canada, Ontario is in danger of becoming the Greece of Confederation—if Greece happened to account for more than a third of Europe’s economy.

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Starting… now

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 9:32 AM - 66 Comments

Stephen Harper, August 2. Harper didn’t stop there, putting in a campaign plug for Ontario’s provincial Conservatives in this fall’s election. ”We started cleaning up the left-wing mess federally in this area. Rob’s doing it municipally. And now we’ve got to complete the hat trick and do it provincially as well.”

Stephen Harper, last Friday. You know I don’t analyse elections, and I don’t get involved in provincial elections. Obviously we congratulate Premier McGuinty on his win. Our governments have worked well during the challenges of the past two or three years, and I look forward to continuing to work with Premier McGuinty’s government.

Reality will bite back in Ontario

By Richard Warnica - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 2:34 PM - 8 Comments

Blair Gable/Maclean's

The Twitterati in my home province of Alberta made a lot of hay this week over a headline in The Globe and Mail that presented the election of Alison Redford, a centrist former justice minister and now provincial premier, as an evolutionary step forward for the knuckle draggers of the Prairie politic. “Alberta steps into the present,” the headline read, to which the easily offended replied, “So where were we before, the past?” Albertans have an almost reflexive sensitivity to criticism from the East. It’s a bit like what the rest of Canada feels for the U.S., a mix of smug superiority and desperation to be noticed. But Albertans should relax. Ontarians seem to think worse of each other than of anybody else. And their politics, well, they’re nothing to brag about.

Take last night’s election. It was, in many ways, an odd campaign. In a province where health care eats up $46 billion a year, more ink was spilled on cross-dressing than on doctors’ salaries. Indeed, it seemed at times as if the parties had made a pact to avoid dealing with most of what a provincial government actually does. Health care? Untouchable. Education? Just keep the kissing booths out and we’re fine. Continue…

Ontarians: voting with their butts for Nobody

By Colby Cosh - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 7:08 AM - 95 Comments

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?

Seven provinces, including Ontario, have adopted fixed election dates, partly as a response to the Turnout Problem. When the Harper government introduced fixed dates in 2006—we all remember how well that turned out, don’t we?—this was one of the stated goals: “One objective of setting fixed election dates is maximizing voter turnout.” Dozens of experts and quasi-experts made this argument, and we now have data from enough fixed-date elections to venture a conclusion on this noble experiment:

 Prov    Elxn           Change in Turnout
 BC      May 17 2005    +2.8%
 PE      May 28 2007    +0.5%
 NL      Oct 9 2007     -9.5%
 ON      Oct 10 2007    -4.1%
 BC      May 12 2009    -7.2%
 NB      Sept 27 2010   +4.0%
 PE      Oct 3 2011     -7.4%
 MB      Oct 4 2011     +0.7%
 ON      Oct 6 2011     -5.2%*
 NL      Oct 11 2011    ?
 SK      Nov 7 2011     ?
 *early estimate

[Points thumb downward, blows raspberry]

As provinces scrambled pell-mell to adopt fixed election dates, a few sociologists and political scientists pointed out that our municipal governments already have them—and that turnouts in Canadian municipal elections, possibly as a consequence, are feeble. Fixed election dates are also a characteristic of American electoral systems, as are pathetic turnouts at every level.

And what else do Canadian municipal elections and U.S. federal and state elections have in common? Huge incumbency advantages. Fixed dates are supposed to relieve a crucial advantage of incumbents in traditional Canadian elections, yet it’s the damnedest thing—if my math is right, incumbents won seven of the nine fixed-date elections in that table, and are extremely likely to be 9-for-11 a month from now. (I wouldn’t recommend establishing any crazy expectations about increased turnout in Newfoundland and Saskatchewan, either.)

Did we make a boo-boo? Did our democracy slip on a banana peel? Turnout Nerds sought fixed-date elections in the name of their obsession with voting as a simplistic moral imperative: it is starting to appear not only as if they failed on their own terms, but that their tonic for democracy may have had unanticipated, or at least undisclosed, side-effects. The Nerds’ next crusade will probably be for electronic voting, and if you think citizens are cynical about electoral politics now, wait until the apparatus falls into the hands of the people who gave the world golden hits like PC LOAD LETTER and PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA.

It is not that the Turnout Nerds have some vast constituency of voters who share their concern. Voter turnout is the kind of imaginary issue that spurs people to parrot pieties to pollsters, but the turnout itself is a perfect revealed-preference measure of how much people actually care. Aside from a few unfortunates who slip and fall or get hit by buses on their way to the polls, there can be almost no such thing as a person who is really concerned about turnout, but who stays home on Election Day. We all have near-total control over whether we turn out or not. The cost of going to the polls is pretty much zero. So the issue, if there is an issue, must be that a lot of people think that voting isn’t even worth the zero—that they personally accomplish nothing or less than nothing by voting: not even the reinforcement of a useful social norm or the cultivation of a private sense of satisfaction. Some of them are surely right about this.

The true place of the Turnout Nerd in the media ecosystem is to fill space—to give us something to talk and worry and argue about in the absence of authentic information about what stirrings and yearnings lie behind the raw vote totals. But the Nerd, with his worrywart ways focused on one principle of political health, may be having the same destructive effects on our political life as any other fundamentalist or monomaniac. These people are the orthorexics of politics. Ask Kenneth Arrow: the creation of a political system is always a balancing act between virtues, a compromise, a kludge. Greater political “engagement” and “involvement” are vague virtues at best; and more “excitement” is, if you ask me, an indubitable positive vice.

So can we start politely ignoring the Turnout Nerd? Heck, I won’t even insist on the “politely” part.

Election night in Ontario

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:40 PM - 15 Comments

With Dalton McGuinty’s side on the cusp of a majority, the TV networks are projecting a reelected Liberal government in Ontario. Results are here.

Depending on your level of interest, it could be a long night.

12:07am. So that was interesting. I spent the evening pretending to know what I was talking about by arguing that no one knows what they’re talking about.

12:24am. Paul Wells, who knows what he’s talking about and has spoken with someone who knows even better, files from the Chateau Laurier.

Politics and reality

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 4 Comments

This Agenda panel was convened to consider the Ontario election, but the discussion is relevant to the federal situation as well.

Third-party advertisers take the spotlight in the Ontario election

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 3 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

Outsiders have never been terribly welcome in Canadian election campaigns. In federal votes, the 95 per cent of us who don’t belong to registered parties face a bulwark of laws restricting third-party campaign spending—rules rooted in the fear that, left unguarded, democracy will be sold off to the highest bidder. This theory has been an article of faith among left-wingers since the early 2000s, when a conservative activist named Stephen Harper waged a court battle against the limits, to the delight of Bay Street’s heavy hitters.

The Supreme Court of Canada ultimately upheld federal third-party spending limits. But few provinces have strong limits of their own. And if Ontario’s current election campaign is any guide, fears of big business stealing elections for conservative parties may have been laughably misplaced. As of last week, all six third-party advertisers registered with the province’s election watchdog were either labour organizations or coalitions who have in the past run attack ads against Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak. Meantime, an array of environmentalists, NGOs and green entrepreneurs have joined forces in hopes of saving the province’s two-year-old Green Energy Act, with plans for unprecedented forays into the ground-level campaign. Leaders of the ad hoc group deny they are acting for or against specific candidates or parties. But Hudak is the only leader committed to undoing the act’s key provisions.

The Tories might have seen this coming. Four years ago, they felt the full force of a labour-funded coalition called Working Families, which took advantage of Ontario’s loose laws on third-party advertisers by unleashing more than $1 million worth of anti-Conservative attack ads that helped propel Premier Dalton McGuinty to victory. The Tories later complained to the province’s chief electoral officer, claiming the group was a front for the Liberals. An investigation indeed revealed ties between Working Families and Grit campaign director Don Guy. But the probe found no evidence that the group was outright controlled by the party.

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Election time and hyperbole is in the air

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 6 Comments

Aaron Vincent Elkaim/CP

Every now and then the province of Ontario takes leave of its collective senses. Grown men jump at shadows. House cats are conjured into dragons. For a time it seems as if the only thought on anyone’s mind is the length of their own toenails. We call these periods “elections.”

Just now this province of 13 million souls is preoccupied with a vast and far-reaching proposal on the part of the governing Liberals to give every new job that comes up to a foreign worker. You read that right: if the Liberals are re-elected, they will make the province’s unemployed sit at home—I believe the slogan is “Ontarians need not apply”—presumably until the supply of foreign workers is exhausted. Indeed, so determined are the Liberals to see these itinerant labourers take over the province that they are actually paying employers to hire them: $10,000 a job.

Quite why the Liberals should wish to do this is unclear, but I have it on no less authority than the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The party has been blanketing the province with advertisements to that effect, while its leader, Tim Hudak, hammers the point home at every opportunity.

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Bullying victims are taking schools to court

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 14 Comments

Ward Perrin/PNG/Vancouver Sun

In 2009, Daniela Cervini, a Toronto-based lawyer, was approached by a group of parents whose children were bullied at an elementary school in Owen Sound, Ont. For years, the parents claim they had been trying the prescribed channels—meetings with vice-principals, principals, police, board superintendents—with what they perceived as no results. They turned to litigation, “just because they weren’t being heard,” says Cervini. This year, four claims were filed in Ontario Superior Court against the Bluewater District School Board involving three schools, five teachers, three principals and one vice-principal. All are for gross negligence—the failure to protect students from bullies. Each lawsuit is for $8.5 million, well above the $1-million standard in personal injury claims. Together, at $34 million, the Bluewater suits are the biggest of their kind in Canada. As Cervini puts it: “You hear so much of this talk in the media and current culture of zero tolerance and bullying. It would seem that the schools have this under control. They don’t.” She expects them to deny the allegations; so far they have filed only a notice of intent to defend.

Bullying lawsuits have appeared in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Waterloo, Ont., as parents turn to the civil courts for justice. And while policies may be consistent in some school districts or provinces, how effective those policies are remains open to debate.

Bullying may have found its way into Ontario courts because the province’s approach has been more focused on discipline. “The easy fix to school boards seems to be you just suspend a kid that did the bullying, which doesn’t fix anything,” says Martha Mackinnon, executive director of Justice for Children and Youth, a Toronto-based legal-aid clinic for children. In Ontario’s initial anti-bullying legislation, the Safe Schools Act, vice-principals and principals were recast as police, required to conduct formal investigations of bullying complaints and penalize offenders according to a gradated system. It’s also known as the “zero tolerance” act.

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‘Foreign workers’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 10:01 AM - 47 Comments

Adam Radwanski watches Jason Kenney watching Tim Hudak.

On Thursday, federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney – the point man for federal Conservative efforts to reach out to new Canadians – used much milder language than Mr. Hudak in expressing concern about Mr. McGuinty’s promise. The previous night, at a rally, Mr. Kenney applauded Mr. Hudak’s line about “foreign workers.” But glancing around him, he looked slightly uncomfortable as he did so.

Dalton McGuinty thinks Tim Hudak should apologize for his language.

Equality of opportunity

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 7 Comments

Jason Kenney comments on the skilled newcomer tax credit proposed by the Ontario Liberals.

“I think we should pursue equality of opportunity for all Canadians,” he said. “I don’t think it’s helpful for newcomers or anyone else to start dividing Canadians based on the longevity of their residency in Canada.”

Kenney said people have suggested a similar idea to him but he said he didn’t think it was fair. He said he didn’t think it was the solution to the province’s “very significant” unemployment problem.

Mr. Kenney’s government does have a Federal Internship for Newcomers program and has committed $22-million to the Bridge Training program for skilled immigrants, in partnership with the McGuinty government.

Green energy contracts legally entrenched

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 0 Comments

The Ontario government has made it impossible for a new government to cancel 1,800 clean energy contracts under its feed-in tariff program ahead of the October election. Altogether, the projects are capable of producing the equivalent of nearly 10 per cent of the province’s current total capacity. But Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, who is leading in public opinion polls, has said he thinks the program is making electricity unaffordable for people, and has promised to cancel the FIT program if elected. The old system was designed so that the Ontario Power Authority could end contracts at advanced stages of the approval process.

The Toronto Star 

The summer strawberry showdown: local vs. Californian

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 5:33 PM - 32 Comments

I think my strawberry obsession has gone too far.  Let me explain: there’s a green grocer right at the end of my street in the west end of Toronto that sells the plastic packs of California berries side by side with the local pints. Continue…

The reform party

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 35 Comments

Through Tim Harper, Progressive Consevative senator Lowell Murray explains his concerns with the current style of Senate reform.

Many otherwise productive senators of a certain age would likely do what he might have done, turn down a job that has only a nine-year lifespan, meaning he or she would have to search new work in their 50s. There would be the obvious tension of elected members working alongside appointed members, and, he says, the Senate becomes the elite body.

An Ontario senator would be elected province-wide and he or she would have a stronger mandate from more voters for a longer period of time than an MP from the province. Such province-wide votes would also be biased against northern and rural representatives and would favour candidates from large urban centres home to large media. It could also lead to U.S.-style gridlock.

Meanwhile, the Ontario government is thinking about joining a legal challenge.

The West is in and Ontario has joined it

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 147 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Democracy, great and terrible as the sea: unknowable, implacable, irresistible, destroyer of parties, deliverer of others, humbler of leaders, elector of bricklayers and assistant pub managers. Tremble before it, and stay out of its path when it moves.

Five parties were picked up, shaken out and tossed aside by the voters in this astonishing election, but of all the many implications one is fundamental: the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada, as dominant, potentially, in the 21st century as the Liberals were in the 20th. This isn’t just a victory, the first Conservative majority in a generation. It is (at least under the terms of the current electoral system) a realignment. Simply put, the West is in—and Ontario has joined it.

The temptation, looking at the wreckage of the Liberal and Bloc Québécois parties and the meteoric rise of the NDP, is to compare this election to 1993, which shattered Brian Mulroney’s old Conservative coalition into its Bloc and Reform party fragments. But it’s much more consequential than that. In retrospect, 1993 changed very little. It handed power to the Liberals, but it did nothing to alter the long-term dynamic of Canadian politics: the remorseless shrinking of the Liberal base.

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Putting it on the map

By Lyndsie Bourgon - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

Sources: Ipsos Reid, Leger Marketing

History books will tell you that the Cabot Trail—the 298 km of highway that snakes along Cape Breton Island’s jagged terrain—is named after John Cabot, who landed in Canada in 1497. What they don’t say, however, is that the Venetian explorer’s real name was Giovanni Caboto. This irks Michael Tibollo, president of the National Congress of Italian-Canadians. So much so that the Toronto lawyer is proposing an “o” be added to the end of the trail’s name on signs and maps.

The thought of changing the name to Caboto Trail—renaming part of the trail came up as a motion in the House of Commons last year but died when the election was called—has spiralled into a cross-provincial spat of sorts. “I’m getting all these negative ‘You Upper Canadian,’ and ‘How dare someone from your part of the country . . .’ comments,” says Tibollo. “I never intended to create a rift between Nova Scotia and Ontario.”

Tibollo says a name change would simply highlight the bond between Cape Breton and Italy, and be a potential boost for the island’s tourism-dependent economy. But Norman MacDonald, president of the Cape Breton Genealogy and Historical Association, says there’s “overwhelming opposition” to the idea. “I don’t think changing the name would bring more Italian tourists,” he says. “We’re very much in favour of heritage discovery trips, but I can see no positive benefits to changing the name.”

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Will Jack Layton usurp Michael Ignatieff?

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 17 Comments

Thanks to a late-campaign surge, the NDP has a real shot at replacing the Liberals as the main alternative to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Jack Layton’s party is arguably closer to forming a government than it’s ever been. But that doesn’t mean the party is actually contending for power. There are clear limits emerging to just how far the party’s sudden popularity might take it.

According to an Innovative Research poll conducted for Maclean’s and L’actualité between April 21 and April 25, the New Democrats are now very close to leapfrogging the Liberals for second place among decided voters. The NDP’s popularity sits at 23.9 per cent, just a point behind the Liberals’ 24.9 per cent. Despite their stagnating fortunes, the Conservatives remain in the driver’s seat going into the final week of campaigning with 38.4 per cent of the vote. Support for the Bloc, meanwhile, has dipped to 6.4 per cent nationally and 27.7 per cent in Quebec, while the Greens sit at 5.3 per cent.

Indeed, the NDP’s rush toward the spotlight from its usual place at the margins of Canadian politics has been the story of the campaign so far. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Quebec, where the party has supplanted the Bloc Québécois as the first choice among province’s prickly voters. The NDP now has 36 per cent support in Quebec, nearly nine points more than the Bloc. Perhaps most significantly, Layton’s party is far ahead of its federalist opponents in the province, with nearly double the support of the Conservatives (18.3 per cent) and an even heftier lead over the Liberals, who are now solidly fourth in voter intentions with a paltry 13.6 per cent support.

“It looks like Layton has created a ‘third option’ in Quebec,” says pollster Greg Lyle, the managing director of Innovative Research. “While hard federalists and especially hard sovereigntists have resisted his appeal, soft federalists and sovereigntists have really gravitated to the NDP.” Among those who describe themselves as “somewhat favourable” to Quebec’s independence, the NDP was the first choice of 53 per cent. Meanwhile, 49 per cent of those who say they’re “somewhat opposed” to Quebec sovereignty say they too will cast their lot with Layton. That push toward the mushy middle of the constitutional divide has left the Conservatives (39.8 per cent) and the Liberals (19.5 per cent) fighting over the hard federalist vote, while the Bloc Québécois takes home the overwhelming majority of (77.1 per cent) of militant sovereigntist votes.

Though less dramatic than in Quebec, the NDP’s popularity in B.C. has seen a similar upward swing. At 29.4 per cent support, the NDP still trails the Conservatives (41.7 per cent) by a significant margin, but it may have seized enough ground to disrupt the Conservatives’ designs on a handful of ridings out west. “The Conservatives may end up breaking even, depending on how hard the NDP surge goes,” Lyle says. “But that’s a big difference—from between four and six pickups to zero. You’ve gone from half the gains you needed for a majority to none. If this is going to be a game of inches on election night—which it might be—then this surge cost them a lot of inches.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s in his home province of Ontario that Layton’s popularity has been most stubbornly stagnant. At 17 per cent, his party trails far behind both the Liberals (36.1 per cent) and the Conservatives (41.4 per cent). Their breakthroughs elsewhere simply haven’t carried over into the one province anointed the key battleground at the start of this election, a situation Lyle attributes partly to a wariness among centre-left voters outside Quebec that voting NDP might clear the path for a Harper majority. “English Canadians are a lot more likely to say this election is a two horse race than Quebecers,” Lyle says. “This may be the reason behind the NDP failure to break through in Ontario.”

Regardless, though Layton’s popularity may end up hitting a wall in Canada’s most populous province come election night, he’ll have at least succeeded in positioning himself at the centre of a post-election coalition scenario—a role even the Conservatives had never imagined could be filled by anyone but Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. That scenario, says Lyle, is now dependent on Layton’s success at wooing those Quebecers who for years have cast their lot with the Bloc Québécois, but are now legitimately intrigued by the NDP. “How far can Layton take this? He could say to Quebecers, ‘Look we may not be able to get into government in one shot, but you can make us number two and set the stage for a progressive coalition that will end the Conservative government’,” Lyle says. “There’s real excitement in Quebec at the idea of a Jack Layton-led minority.”

The online survey was conducted among current members of INNOVATIVE’s Canada 20/20 panel from April 21st to April 25th, 2011. The Canada 20/20 Panel is recruited from a wide variety of sources to be representative of the known distribution of Canadians by age, gender, region and language. The weighted total sample included 1543 responses eligible for inclusion in our analysis including 363 in Quebec. An unweighted probability sample of 1543 would have an estimated margin of error of ±2.49 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Stephen Harper's constitution

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 167 Comments

Peter Mansbridge interviewed Stephen Harper today—on a hockey rink no less—and, as expected, the conversation turned to the spectre of opposition parties uniting in some way to defeat the sitting government and form a new government.

Here is the exchange that follows Mr. Harper’s insistence that, short of a Conservative majority, the “other guys” would try to form government. Continue…

The King's precedent

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 5:04 PM - 70 Comments

John Duffy recalls what preceded the King-Byng Affair.

That said, I certainly agree that Mr. Harper knows his Mackenzie King … He’ll know, then, that King actually did govern from below a plurality from 1925 until 1926. So there are federal as well as provincial precedents for non-plurality governments.

To these then, Mr. Mansbridge might add one more question for Mr. Harper: Do you believe Mackenzie King’s government in 1925 or the Liberal-NDP accord in Ontario in 1985 were illegitimate?

This week: Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Andy Clark/Reuters

Vive la France!

France played a crucial role this week in the surrender and arrest of the Ivory Coast’s defeated president Laurent Gbagbo and his militiamen. With its troops on the ground, France has publicly pledged to help the troubled nation in its reconstruction. Along with its recent calls for greater NATO involvement in Libya, France has suddenly become a robust player on the international stage, flexing its muscle in the name of democracy and global stability. It’s just too bad that same spirit isn’t on display back home, where French police arrested two women under the ban on wearing face-concealing veils in public.

In the classroom

The organization that regulates Ontario’s 230,000 teachers issued a new rule this week: no more connecting with students on social media. Teachers have been warned not to “friend” their pupils on Facebook, subscribe to their Twitter accounts, or use Flickr, LinkedIn or MySpace to interact online. Give the College of Teachers an A+ on this. The student-teacher relationship belongs in a classroom, not a chat room.

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Battleground Ontario

By Charlie Gillis and John Geddes - Friday, April 8, 2011 at 9:09 AM - 18 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

For Phat and Mo Nguyen, the chance to choose a government is no small privilege. In the spring of 1980, the couple fled Communist Vietnam, setting off with their four young children from the Mekong Delta among refugees who would become known, collectively, as the Boat People. “We almost died,” says Mo, shuddering at the memory of 10 miserable days spent adrift in a leaky river boat on the South China Sea, with dwindling reserves of fresh water, food and hope. But for a family seeking a few simple liberties—free speech, the right to vote—the risk seemed worth it.

Three months after landing half-starved and exhausted in Marang, Malaysia, the Nguyens got the break that changed their lives: an invitation to Canada—land of freedom and one of only a handful of countries unreservedly welcoming Vietnamese asylum seekers. They settled in Toronto’s western suburbs, both finding jobs with the airline catering giant Cara Foods. For years afterward, the Nguyens based their voting on gratitude. “We loved Pierre Trudeau,” says 68-year-old Phat, now retired. “Fifty thousand Vietnamese he let into Canada. That was a great thing. We voted Liberal many times.”

Yet now, standing in the foyer of his Mississauga, Ont., home, Nguyen ticks off the strengths of another, much different leader who positively loathed Trudeau: Stephen Harper. His Conservatives will get Nguyen’s vote on May 2 for reasons rooted in both his conscience and pocketbook. Harper won his approval in 2006, he says, when he voiced concern about human rights in Vietnam during an APEC conference in Hanoi. After that, Phat watched with satisfaction as Conservative strength in southern Ontario grew.

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Ontarians fear, respect Harper: poll

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 167 Comments

Conservatives hoping for a breakthrough in “Battleground Ontario” are once again running up against suspicion of Stephen Harper, a survey done for Maclean’s and 680 News indicates.

When asked how they would vote if the election were held today, 37 per cent of respondents on Innovative Research Group’s Canada 20/20 panel said they would cast ballots for the Conservatives, while 33 per cent indicated they would vote Liberal. NDP support stood at 14 per cent, while the Greens scored nine per cent.

The spread between the two front-running parties is well below that shown at the beginning of the campaign, when polls suggested Conservative support in Ontario was running as high as 47 per cent and Grit support around 33 per cent. Those early results led to speculation of a Conservative majority, as southwestern Ontario and the heavily populated areas around Toronto are home to a slew of hotly contested ridings that could tilt the outcome of the election.

Unfortunately for the Tories, the recent findings suggest Ontarians still have reservations about both Harper and the party. Continue…

Farooq was investigated twice by OPCP prior to arrest

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 1, 2011 at 2:42 PM - 4 Comments

Salman Farooq, the former Ontario Progressive Conservative Party candidate who was arrested earlier this week and charged with several counts of fraud, was twice investigated by party officials in connection with fraud allegations but was kept on as a candidate until he stepped down for “health reasons.” Farooq has been charged with 14 criminal counts related to mortgage fraud, credit card fraud, and forged cheques. OPC Party spokesman Alan Sakach told The Globe and Mail that Farooq had cleared party background checks, but said “at no time was the Ontario PC Party aware of a police investigation into the business dealings of Salman Farooq.” Party leader Tim Hudak has not commented publicly on the matter.

The Globe and Mail

Are there lessons for Canada in Japan's nuclear near-meltdown?

By Kate Lunau - Friday, March 25, 2011 at 4:09 PM - 12 Comments

Bruce Fidler is the mayor of Creighton, Sask., a town of about 1,500 people on the border with Manitoba. “It’s pretty much a one industry community,” he says. “Mining is the largest employer we’ve got.” If Fidler gets his way, that could one day change: this town could become a nuclear waste dump. Continue…