According to Premier-elect Dalton McGuinty, his party won last week’s Ontario Election by “taking the high road”. Unlike those mean-spirited Tories, who kept telling people that he was “still not up to the job” (not to mention calling him “a reptilian kitten-eater from another planet”), he assured voters that his party was running a positive, issue-focused campaign. It would be more accurate to say that his party carefully maintained the appearance of running a positive, issue-focused campaign.

Speaking on CBC Radio the day after the election, Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella (who proudly wears the label “Prince of Darkness”) bragged about how the Liberals kept their leader’s hands clean, while running a negative campaign behind the scenes. Toronto MPP George Smitherman was trotted out before the cameras at every opportunity to attack the Conservative and NDP platforms in the most scathing terms possible, earning him the nickname “Attack Dog”.

Meanwhile, the party released a steady flood of news releases condemning the other parties. The press releases aimed at the Tories contained catchphrases such as “Ernie Eves: You just can’t trust him”, which were just as negative as anything employed in the Tories’ messaging. The press releases that were aimed at the NDP routinely distorted the party’s platform and frequently took out of context previous comments made by leader Howard Hampton. They even sent a “brown envelope” to The National Post, falsely accusing Hampton of plagiarizing his book.

One Liberal news release that received significant media attention (including a front page story in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and a major article in The Globe and Mail) was one criticizing fifty Conservative candidates for failing to attend all-candidates meetings in their respective ridings. Calling them “deadbeats” — a term normally reserved for people who don’t pay their child support — the release details a series of instances in which invitations were turned down, or accepted initially and then reneged upon. While I agree that this is a concern, and raised it myself in a previous column, the Liberal pot should not be calling the Tory kettle black. In Kitchener-Waterloo riding, for example, incumbent Elizabeth Witmer was criticized for her lack of availability. Yet, the fact that Liberal candidate Sean Strickland had already missed three debates himself means that the Liberals were hardly well-placed to criticize her on the issue.

Strickland indicated on election night that he was proud of running an “honourable campaign”. Maybe he was hoping that no one reading that comment had seen the flyer that his campaign distributed throughout the riding on the day before Election Day. The front and back of the flyer reads “Who wants you to vote NDP?” Inside, appears the name and smiling face of none other than Ernie Eves. “Dont be fooled! It’s all part of Ernie Eves’ election strategy”, warns the flyer. “It” presumably refers to the NDP campaign (and to think I had no idea that I was part of such a nefarious plot).

As absurd as this kind of mindless fear tactic may seem, its sliminess is further magnified by the distortions employed in trying to make the case. For example, it quotes a month-old poll result for September 3 — the only poll result of its kind during the campaign — to suggest that the Tories were actually close to the Liberals in terms of popular support. Six polls had been released since that date, all showing the Liberals with a healthy lead and projecting a Liberal majority. It also quotes the “Kitchener-Watlerloo (sic) Record” as noting that the Tories first won Huron riding in 1995 “after an unusually strong New Democratic Party candidate effectively split the centre-left with the Liberals”. Conveniently absent is the fact that the Liberals actually finished THIRD in that race.

The appearance of the photocopied flyer is deliberately crude and amateurish, suggesting that it may have been dashed off by some interested voter working out of his or her basement. Only in the most microscopic font available does the flyer indicate that it was actually produced and paid for by the Ontario Liberal Party. If Sean Strickland feels that he ran an “honourable campaign”, he clearly has a different definition of the word “honourable” than I do.

Moreover, the Liberals reportedly had their own series of attack ads ready to go and simply decided not to use them — but only after focus groups turned thumbs down on the strategy. Their claims of virtue and their feigned horror at Tory campaign tactics are simply not credible. Despite claims to the contrary, the Liberal’s so-called “high road” campaign really wasn’t that much different than the Tories’ “road ahead” campaign. It remains to be seen whether the kind of government they run is much different than that run by the Tories.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...