Analysts will pick away at last week’s election for months and eventually historians will do the picking. We will read what the pundits write,
nod up and down or side to side and maybe have something to say ourselves.
But I am not thinking about the election right now.
An old cliche in Canadian politics says that when a party takes a really severe trouncing at the polls it has been ‘banished to the wilderness’.
To appreciate everything that this means I think you really have to be there.
I have been there. More than once.
You do not really recognize where you are when you arrive.
Everything seems pretty much the same. The people around you are familiar, the language is still the language you speak,
the institutional landmarks look unchanged.
And so you wander your precincts, dazed, trapped somewhere between disbelief and the expectation that you are about to awaken
from a bad dream.
“Surely, there has been a mistake,” you say and you hear said.
“My countrymen never meant for this to happen.”
Eventually and to your dismay you realize that your countrymen actually did it to you on purpose and things are truly different.
Your keys don’t work in the locks anymore.
The survivors of a vicious political massacre are often heard mumbling things like:
“Voters will regret it when they realize what they’ve done.”
“They were temporarily upset with us but they will come around.”
“If the popular vote distribution was a little different …”
“If we had just won those seats we lost by only x% … “
Back in 1985 the Ontario PC Party bought its ticket to political irrelevance without realizing it.
After holding power for over four decades the party’s grip on the province’s confidence slipped and the change went largely ignored.
Suddenly, the pesky voters reduced the party to a minority and then the opposition parties ganged up and gave the government to the Liberals.
Five years later the PCs finished 3rd in an NDP win.
In 2018 the Liberal Party of Ontario was banished to the wilderness and despite another election, it is still there.
Last Thursday’s results may have something to do with what happened four years ago but the election outcome has a lot more to do
with what has and has not been going on in the Big Tent pitched as it is out there north of nowhere.
The Party took a pass when given four years to re-define itself.
In word and deed, in acts of omission and commission the Party decided to promise Ontario more of the same.
Another two or three elections based on the same thinking will qualify The Liberal Party of Ontario to claim the status
currently held by the guy who continued to do the same thing over and over again certain that he will eventually get a different result.
There is a story about an old farmer who made his first trip away from home and went to the zoo. He was seen standing close to the fence,
head back, gaze fixed skyward and heard muttering, “Nope. There’s no such thing as a giraffe.”
Since 2018 Ontario Liberals keep reminding me of that farmer when they must put the word Premier ahead of the name Ford.
For a while back in the ‘80s there were PCs who would tell you with some conviction that David Peterson did well politically
because he looked a bit like Bill Davis.
Loser talk echos for a long time in the wilderness.
How long the Liberal Party of Ontario will spend huddled in a corner of that big tent depends on how long it takes the Party
to expel pointless rancour from the collective system, trade the delusions of the last four years for a swig of reality,
accept that nobody in Ontario was angry at Liberals for anything in 2022 and perhaps no part of the election was ever about the Liberal Party.
Decide that everybody was to blame so nobody was. Scrape the crap of the past from your shoes and move on.
Admittedly, I know a good deal more about life in the wilderness than I know about how to get out of it.
But if I had mailed a postcard from that horrible, depressing place on the last day of the last time I lived there it would say,
“Incumbency does not survive your first loss.”
Maybe you were voters’ darlings for decades but once you lose their confidence or their trust you need to go back to square one and build something new
from the ground up. It seems so obvious but the notion that you can engineer a win with no more than fine-tuning after you hit rock bottom
has been irresistible to just about everyone who has experienced it.
Should anyone in the Liberal Party of Ontario who is into history, who understands the extent and limitations of its value and wants to study an Ontario case
of successful escape, I recommend the PC Party of Ontario under Mike Harris, 1990-1995.
There are many other equally teachable political cases, I am sure, but this is a good one. It is the best I know.
Mike inherited a broken party. Everything you could possibly break was broken. Since Bill Davis retired the Party couldn’t win for losing.
As my friend the late Larry Grossman told me at lunch on election day, September 10, 1987, “The Party picked the wrong leader twice.”
He was referring to Frank Miller and then to himself. Frank was too Conservative for Toronto, Larry was … ahem … “too short, too liberal and too Toronto”
for Frank’s constituency and by ’87 Toronto had discovered David Peterson and no longer trusted the PC Party.
Once it goes, it is truly gone.
When Mike got it the Party was deep, deep in debt. From a banker’s point of view, history must have enhanced the Party’s apparent debt capacity
because the numbers were huge. What Mike did, step by step, from the day he won the leadership to the day he won the Province is truly amazing.
Mike shut down headquarters almost as soon as he won the leadership, as I recall, and managed with a very small staff.
Sixteen seats in the Ledge does not qualify a party for much. Things were quiet for a long time, for years.
One day as election planning was well underway Mike came to see me, to recruit me for a job.
(A campaign position for which I was unqualified and temperamentally unsuited and so declined.)
We hadn't spoken in several years but here he is, in my office, pitching me.
The first documents he handed me were the financials.
When I saw how Mike Harris with steadfastness and the help of very few people had rebuilt banks’ confidence I nearly fell off my chair.
If the debt he inherited had been a big, shiny red apple then what was left was just the core. And the apple had been consumed in very small bites.
Then, to win my heart, he showed me something I had been tugging coats about for a long time. He showed me a Candidacy. Not a candidate. A Candidacy.
He showed me plans for The Common Sense Revolution.
I was stunned. Perhaps I didn’t much care for all the content but it was clearly a political winner. Mike didn’t author it. I know the authors. He recruited them.
He managed the development process or deserves credit for letting somebody else do it to his satisfaction.
The authors were not part of Bill Davis’ Big Blue Machine. They were outsiders, right-wingers who had been pushed into a corner of the Tories’ Big Blue Tent.
The Tory Tent was that big? Who knew?
Soon-to-be Premier Harris wanted to recruit me just to retain some institutional memory.
The BBM had earned a reputation for arrogance in the hinterlands and I was internally famous for being unknown, stayed off television and out of the newspapers.
I turned down the job because of the truth. For one thing, if the new party didn’t take to those other guys, it would most certainly reject me like a bad oyster.
Everybody loved us when we were winning.
It doesn’t please me particularly to acknowledge this stuff but it is critical to my point.
When we decide to accept the need to change, it is good to remember that the future is when the unthinkable occurs.
I am quite sure that there is hope for the Liberal Party of Ontario but it may require searching the shadows in the big tent,
welcoming some new points of view before hope morphs into a future to be brightened with some election wins.
