In any recent Ontario election campaign, the collapse of a Liberal lead in the polls is as predictable as the sudden appearance of red, orange or blue lawn signs in your neighbourhood. The Ontario Liberal Party is quite adept at maintaining strong support between elections, but that’s about as useful as a sports team that wins every game during the pre-season while losing every year in the playoffs.

Two weeks ago, political commentators were saying that this election was Dalton McGuinty’s to lose; he appears determined to prove them right by losing it. With a campaign that seeks to borrow the more popular elements of both the NDP and Conservative platforms, McGuinty seems incapable of sounding convincing — likely because he’s changed positions so often, he no longer knows what he believes.

Take McGuinty’s stance on one of the key issues in the NDP platform, power generation and distribution. While he now claims to be in step with the NDP’s push to keep the system public, McGuinty’s record of support for privatization and deregulation is well documented. As Liberal Energy Critic in 1992, McGuinty presented a petition calling on the then-NDP government to “promote economic and social accountability by permitting competition to offer an alternative to the monopoly now held by Ontario Hydro.” In 2001, he told a radio show that “We believe you’ve got to go towards deregulation. That’s the way to bring this thing to heel. That’s the way to introduce real competition.”

In the same year, when inviting energy industry executives to give money to the Liberals, the party noted that “Throughout Ontario’s electricity restructuring process, Dalton and the Ontario Liberals have been consistent supporters of the move to an open electricity market in Ontario.” Confronted with evidence that he’d flip-flopped on hydro, McGuinty could only tell reporters: “I honestly believed I’d never said that. I didn’t recall at the outset that I’d said what I’d said.” How inspiring!

As a New Democrat, I find it frustrating that people like Buzz Hargrove continue to present the Liberals as a viable electoral option for members of the CAW and others. In pitching the same failed strategic voting plan that failed in 1999, Hargrove promised that he’s “going to pin down the Liberals and the New Democratic Party on where they’re at. We want anti-scab legislation back to defend the interests of working people in this province.”

But, Buzz Hargrove already knows very well where the parties stand on this issue. The fourth of ten points in the NDP’s platform promises that the party will “Immediately increase the minimum wage to $8 an hour, prohibit scabs and treat injured workers fairly.” In a survey conducted by the Ontario Federation of Labour earlier this year, parties were asked if they would reinstate the anti-scab law. The NDP gave a one-word answer: “Yes”. In contrast, the Liberals stated, “We will not bring back anti-scab legislation” (then went on to obfuscate for several more sentences). The choice for people who care about workplace democracy couldnt be clearer.

Still, there are some NDP voters who are being seduced by the argument that a vote for the Liberals is the best way to oust the Tories from power. The strategy wont work this time either. That’s because it focuses solely on moving NDP votes to the Liberals, instead of seeking to convince people who voted Tory in 1999 to change their vote. More than a few New Democrats held their nose and made the change in the last election, but the Tory vote held steady in ridings such as Kitchener-Waterloo and Waterloo-Wellington, where the Tories have achieved close to or more than fifty per cent of the vote. The math doesn’t work any better than the “strategy”.

In 1999, in the riding of Don Valley West (one being touted as a potential breakthrough for strategic voting), David Turnbull pulled in over 50 per cent of the vote for the Tories, and had a plurality of 3169 (more than the 2152 votes that the NDP candidate received). To win the riding this time, the Liberals don’t need to work on the 2152 NDP voters, the 312 who voted for the Independent or the 224 who voted Natural Law. They need to work on the soft Tory voters and give them a reason to switch their votes (and not when contacted by pollsters between elections). So far, they haven’t done so.

As much as I want Ernie Eves to be defeated on October 2, the real objective has to be changing the destructive policies that have plagued the province since 1995. I’m simply not convinced that Dalton McGuinty would do that, even if he does manage to point his campaign bus in the right direction.

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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...