Ontario polling - June 26, 2011

Horwath is going to be a strong campaigner, and she presents a very personable alternative to Hudak and McGuinty. There is also the McGuinty fatigue, and (hopefully), aversion to electing Conservative regimes simultaneously in Ottawa, Toronto and Queen's Park. When the campaign begins in earnest and voters begin to take notice, I'm confident we'll see that reflected in the polling.

Doug wrote:

This sort of thing isn't going to help the McGuinty crew. The worst Liberals seem to be able to say about the Ontario NDP platform is that it uses stock photos.

If you ever wondered if Kinsella has lost his game or not this about proves it.  I also think he must be lying outright.  Media reports and facebook status' I read reported quite a large and energetic crowd.  If the best the Liberals can come up with is a stupid photo thing that ALL parties do and then to actually misrepresent things than we can now be sure the Liberal internal polling is even worse than the public domain poll above.

On that poll - Conservative numbers will be soft because it is mostly a parked vote.  What is clear is that McGuinty is toast. People have clearly decided one thing  - they don't want a McGuinty lead Liberal government.  They have turned against McGuinty in large measure.  The next question is where next?  The Conservative is the long term default option, but if I were the Cons I would be very scared of a Horwath led NDP.  She is the exact opposite of Hudak.  Where he oozes insencerity- she comes off as a credible, real person.   Where Hudak comes off as shallow and out of touch- Horwath seems like your neighbour who has lived through the same problems as you.

I dislike polls in general- but if this trend holds, or the Liberals continue to sink even further before the writ - all bets are off, and anyone has a shot at government.

So the NDP has said f you to the environment in addition to its anti-tax crusade....lowering prices on key energy polluters (gas and electricity) isn't exactly good for the environment and doesn't support conservation. They are vote winners though. Have to give them credit for that, and let's face it, environmentalists aren't a big voting block. Of course so is attacking the poor is a vote winner too; Hudak's cutting off newcomer's access to social assistance for a year has scored well in opinion polling. Let's hope the NDP doesn't go there!

I can already see the second show about to drop from the Liberal corpse and the first sign is when the Liberal bloggers start getting bitter and nasty because they know their party is going off a cliff at every level: Smitherman for mayor TOTAL FAILURE, Ignatieff for PM TOTAL FAILURE and now McGoofball will end up in a scrap heap alongside Smitherman and Iggy.

Life, the universe, everything wrote:

Ah the myopic view from the COTU.  How could we live without it.

To be fair, you would think the party would have an environmental section to its platform, which it currently doesn't. I would certainly look forward to hearing the NDP's plans in this regard.

Stockholm wrote:

I read that the whole environmental platform is to be announced at a later date.

Thanks. Please do keep us posted when it's rolled out.

Ipsos Cons 42; Liberals 31; NDP 22.

There are variables-- if the NDP can produce a good campaign and gain support some of that will come from the Cons as well -- hopefully enough to remove the majority support.

NDP support going up when the Cons are in power is likely to come form the Liberals but when the Liberals are in power it can easily come form the Cons as well-- a rising opposition party often hurts the other opposition parties first because it is a referendum on the government and people that are opposed to the government are searching for options.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Ontario+Tories+open+point+lead+over+ru...

The NDP platform is pretty right wing. Very little on poverty, basically just committing to the recommendations that will be put forh by the social assistance review commission, which the Liberals put in place (and indexing social assistance rates with a price tag on it that is probably half or less of what it would actually cost to do it). Wonder what NDP poverty activists running for office think of that one? Really bad on the environment by committing to underpricing gas and energy. And tax cuts. A lot of it is pretty indistinguishable from the Conservatives. Honestly, it probably makes them more of a force with the electorate than their typical lefty stuff, but certainly strays from their principles.

Thanks for posting the talking points from the Liberal war room.  I haven't seen them in a few days and I was feeling lonely.

Life, the universe, everything wrote:

Thanks for posting the talking points from the Liberal war room.  I haven't seen them in a few days and I was feeling lonely.

It seems that Liberal attacks are devited primarily to the NDP and not Hudak.

The Liberals implemented the Ontario Child Benefit. That's better than raising welfare rates as far as I'm concerned. The NDP is committing to do nothing more on social assistance than the Liberals have already done. They're certainly not committing to the $100 food supplement some activists have been calling for or reversing any of the Harris cuts.

Amazing you know this given that the full NDP platform has not been released.  Liberals are magical.

Remember the fuss over this by Liberal reporters.  When asked about why she hadn't released the full platform Horwath quipped - "I'm a woman I know not to give it all up right away."  The Liberal media proxies even tried to make an issue of this.

So now those magical Liberals already know what is in the full platform.  Maybe I will have to vote for a party with that kind of mystical power.

Let's wait and see since there is much more of the NDP platform to come...one thing for sure is that the Ontario Liberals will forge ahead with their suite of sleazy public-private partnership boondoggles and they'll have a firesale of government assets etc...

Everything you need to know about the Ontario Liberals is that their "star candidate" (definitely the dimmest star in the galaxy!) in Trinity-Spadina is that Rosedale matron Sarah Thomson who was backed by the Tory family and whose platform in her ill-fated mayoralty run was consisted of her wearing furs and pearls and spouting rightwing nostrums in her inimical Marie Antoinette "let them eat cake" style. I expect her to campaign with her toy poodle waving at people from her Mercedes.

If I were the Liberals I'd fight the NDP by running on their record. They're probably the most progressive government in Canada, including a lot of NDP governments.

Ok, curious to see if anything more comes out of the NDP platform on poverty. Michael Prue was quoted in NOW today saying poverty isn't a vote winner, so not sure there will be, but we'll see. Certainly don't expect they'll be raising welfare any more than the Liberals.

Olly wrote:

If I were the Liberals I'd fight the NDP by running on their record. They're probably the most progressive government in Canada, including a lot of NDP governments.

More Liberal magic

LHINs? - poof    gone

rural school closures because we still have the Harris funding formula - poof     gone

Ombudsman oversight on a number of important issues - poof    gone

massive privatization of our electrial system- poof     gone

Melancthon quarry - poof    gone

Jail closings in Walkerton/Owen Sound/Sarnia destroying local support connection - poof   gone

HST increasing costs of Ontario's must vulnerable - poof      gone

There's more, but Liberal magic is so strong it shields all viewers.

I think a rural and urban Ontarian would have differ greatly as to whether or not the McGuinty government has been "terrible".  Most people out here would vote yes.   I don't know what will happen elsewhere but the Liberals are done in rural/small town Ontario.  No one believes them anymore after having been burnt so many times.  That means that we are at least heading to a minority government of some sort.  

Life, the universe, everything wrote:

I think a rural and urban Ontarian would have differ greatly as to whether or not the McGuinty government has been "terrible".

I'd even suggest that McGuinty's refusal to upload municipal services was key in undermining former Toronto Mayor David Miller, setting the stage for the election of Rob Ford.

Doug wrote:

Liberals hoping to keep power in the Oct. 6 election are fanning across Toronto during Friday morning’s rush hour to hand out flyers saying the NDP “abandons the environment.”

Since cutting down those trees to make pamphlets that are going to end up as litter is a responsible environmental thing to do.

The Ontario Liberals still don't have any candidates to replace their quitters in Davenport, don valley east, Essex, Windsor West etc...oh well I'm sure they can find some derelicts who register 98.6 on rectal thermometer who are willing to be sacrificial lambs in those seats that theOLP now has zero chance of winning

Aristotleded24 wrote:

[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MsugpLYy2A]If you vote NDP, do you even know who you're voting for?[/url]

At first i was pretty insulted, the "university undergrads and teenagers" comment linked to a picture of a kid getting trashed, is pretty desperate. But i thought about it, and i remember reading the posts of the performance thus far of our young MPs... the liberals have dug themselves into another whole, and ostracized another group of voters. They have basically said if your young you have no right to be in politics; if your not a lawyer/banker/elite you have no right to be running... the (mentioned above) arrogance is just spilling out. I love the "finding new people is hard..." comment, oh yes, thats why they gave themselves a 30% raise wasn't it?

But to address the environmental question... its already been poked at by david suzuki (that hit hard)

http://theliberalscarf.blogspot.com/ BUT i know the full platform has not been released, i'm not worried yet but does anyone have an idea what the environ platform might look like... so that we can quel davids fears

Olly wrote:

"I'd even suggest that McGuinty's refusal to upload municipal services was key in undermining former Toronto Mayor David Miller, setting the stage for the election of Rob Ford."

McGuinty did upload a number of services. Welfare and ODSP will be fully covered by the province for example instead of cost shared 20%. That's a huge savings for cities. The gist of what I'm getting from this board is that people think the Liberals should move right? (Because Ignatieff failed at the federal level on a leftish platform) Interesting.

Most of us are pretty partisan i think, some more than others. And as mentioned already the way the board feels about the ON Liberals varies. I agree with Stock, McGuinty's government has been so-so, in some cases i've supported the direction they have gone in principle (like the Green energy act) if not supporting the way in which is done. But i see them as centre-right typical blah moderate liberals.

Olly, if the Ontario Liberals are so gosh-darn progressive, then why did they collapse like a house of cards when bigots started complaining about the revised sex-ed program? When you pander to bigots, your personal views become irrelevant.