A Place To Stand: The 1967 centennial theme for Ontario, Canada. A time when the mining sector was booming, well respected and an integral part of a booming economy, once of the most successful in the world. How did we let it slip away? – Stan Sudol
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
Something happened to Canada’s largest province well before this June 12th election was even called.
Ontario lost its swagger.
One former provincial cabinet minister likens the mood to what Keith Spicer found more than 20 years ago when his Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future took the pulse of the nation and found it very weak indeed.
But this is no case – as was clearly the situation in Ontario back in 1990 – of taking such delight in kicking David Peterson’s Liberals out of office that no one considered that Bob Rae’s NDP government would thereby win a majority by default. Remember Mr. Rae’s line to the CBC when it was apparent he had won? “I’m having difficulty getting used to it.”
So, too, did those who kicked him into office, a sentiment repeated after they voted Mr. Rae out in 1995 and replaced him with the ideologically opposite Mike Harris. That may well explain why there seems such reticence among Ontario voters to act in any direction.
Any Canadian election will produce cynics who say “none of the above,” but this one seems on the verge of turning that call into a majority. A reporter moving about the province quickly discovers that even the committed are profoundly disappointed: Liberals sheepish about the scandals; Progressive Conservatives embarrassed by their own math; NDPers baffled by their lack of presence.
There is an anger out there and it reaches beyond soaring hydro rates. There is a genuine fear of putting someone in just to get someone out.
“From what I can tell,” says Sean Conway, once a powerful minister in the Peterson cabinets, now a part-time lecturer at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, “many Ontarians are worried about their economic prospects. And these people want to take out their frustration on the traditional political class. The Rob Ford phenomenon is clearly an expression of ‘politics not as usual.’ The current mood reminds me of what Keith Spicer found in the early nineties – a lot of Canadians really annoyed with the so-called elites.”
In Ontario, however, even the elites feel short-changed when it comes to the current state of Confederation. Used to having considerable clout with federal governments, whether Red Tory or Blue Liberal, Ontario power brokers aren’t quite certain how much of Ottawa’s ear they can claim. All they know for sure is it isn’t the same. National thought and action used to spring from places like Montreal’s Outremont, Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park and, significantly, Toronto’s Rosedale and Annex – not southern Alberta.
That disconnect with Ottawa mirrors the gap spreading between the provincial capital and the province that lies beyond sight of the CN Tower. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen recently, David Reevely looked at the various issues the three leaders appeared consumed with – Ontario Place development, GO trains, subway extension, traffic snarls – and concluded it appears to the rest of Ontario as if they are all running for mayor, not premier.
Once considered “the linchpin of Confederation,” Canada’s biggest province has become one of its smallest psychologically. From the days when premier Bill Davis seemed to be the voice of reason around federal-provincial tables, Ontario today seems a province in search of reason. And, of course, that federal-provincial table was hauled out to the curb some years ago by the federal government.
“Back in the Davis era and before,” says Claire Hoy, who wrote from Queen’s Park for decades for the Sun chain of newspapers, “both the Ontario and Quebec premiers enjoyed a status just slightly below that of the prime minister at the federal-provincial meetings, but then Ontario premiers didn’t go to them whining, cap-in-hand, and constantly carping about getting a raw deal. Now, I suspect, if the Ontario premier showed up at a federal-provincial meeting, he or she would need a name tag.”
Ontario was formerly the ultimate “have” province, with a sense of happily propping up so many lesser provinces, and with so much luxury and goodwill that Mr. Peterson, for example, could toss Senate seats upon that dimly remembered federal-provincial conference table as if they were excess poker chips that might help solve a constitutional stalemate.
The one-time “engine” of the Canadian economy remains financially critical, but the revving of the national engine comes far more from the West than the East.
For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/globe-politics-insider/ontarios-lost-swagger-its-now-a-have-not-province-with-a-dont-want-election/article19113117/#dashboard/follows/