By Tasha Kheiriddin - from the National Post
The current Ontario election campaign has all the excitement of, well, small-town Ontario in August. On this, I speak from experience: I live in Whitby, which at 111,000 souls isn’t actually that small, but feels like political zombie-land despite the fact that provincial voting day looms less than two months away. None of my neighbours are talking about the election: a far hotter topic was the recent heat wave, which left several parched lawns in its wake.
Rewind just one year, and contrast this season’s listlessness to last summer’s frenetic horse race between Toronto mayoral candidates Rob Ford and George Smitherman. After two terms of mayor David Miller, Toronto voters had enough of big debt and high taxes. The race produced a blizzard of front page headlines and “Stop the gravy train” T-shirts. Everyone paid attention, even the people on my street, who weren’t eligible to cast a ballot.
Similarly, after eight years of Liberal rule, the current provincial election should be a no-brainer for the Ontario PCs. Issues? Take your pick: broken promises, higher taxes, an ever-growing nanny state, botched energy policy, long health-care wait lists, government mismanagement, a slide from “have” to “have-not” equalization status. From the economy to eHealth, Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have screwed up all over the place, producing a target-rich environment for their opponents.
But while Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives continue to outpace their rivals, there are rain clouds on the horizon. While polls published between May and July showed the Tories comfortably ahead of the Liberals, in one case by a whopping 11 points, in the last week, two new surveys reveal a shift in opinion.
The first poll, conducted by Nanos Research, show the Tories’ lead narrowing from 7.3 points in May to 4.5 points in August, in the wake of the Liberals’ new round of negative ads. Over the same period, the survey shows Liberal support rising from 34% to 37.6%, mostly at the expense of the NDP, while Conservative numbers held statistically steady at 41.3% and 42.1% respectively.
Similarly, a recent “flash sample” of 400 voters conducted by Ipsos Reid showed a narrower gap, with 38% of respondents intending to vote for the PCs, versus 36% for the Liberals. Ipsos’s more comprehensive survey of leadership and issues also revealed shifting ground. On the topic of who would make the best premier, 38% of respondents chose Mr. Hudak, while 33% picked Mr. McGuinty. A year ago, only 29% of voters favoured the Liberal Premier, while 37% preferred the PC leader. At the same time, 66% think it’s time for a change of government, while only 34% think the Liberals have done a good job and should be re-elected.
These results led Ipsos’s president John Wright to conclude, “While the Conservatives have the edge, this is going to be a tightly fought campaign…. It’s going to matter what messages and policies either the opposition or the government will take to the people.”
And there’s the rub. While the Tories have rightly seized on the theme of change, their “Changebook” doesn’t go far enough on the key issue: the pocketbook.
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