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Toronto Star: By-election loss bad omen for Liberals

Ian Urquhart

September 18, 2006

There were danger signals flashing all over the provincial Liberals' by-election defeat in Parkdale-High Park last week.

And if they go unheeded, these signals could portend the defeat of the Liberal government in next year's provincial election.

First of all, the Liberal share of the popular vote in Parkdale-High Park dropped a precipitous 25 percentage points, with almost all of it going to the victorious New Democrats.

This suggests that we have seen the end of "strategic voting" — the label given to NDP-leaning voters opting to back the Liberals to defeat the Conservatives.

With strategic voting, Gerard Kennedy took Parkdale-High Park for the Liberals with a whopping 58 per cent of the vote in the 2003 general election — and the Conservatives lost the election province-wide.

If, indeed, strategic voting is a thing of the past — because NDP-leaning voters no longer consider the Conservatives to be scary enough to change their allegiance — the Liberals will probably lose the general election next year.

Moreover, in last week's by-election, the Liberals were subjected to attacks by a wide range of interest groups, including:

• Environmentalists. A coalition called the Campaign for a Clean, Green Energy Future — comprised of Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club — distributed anti-nuclear pamphlets at the door and peppered the Liberal candidate with questions at all-candidates meetings. Also active in the by-election campaign were the Ontario Clean Air Alliance and the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
• Education critics. School trustees in the area, both public and Catholic, distributed literature denouncing the "fundamental flaws" in the government's funding formula for education. They also staged an all-candidates meeting where the Liberal candidate was the main target. And a group called the Campaign for Public Education distributed a flyer calling on voters to cast a ballot against the Liberal government for "fail(ing) to protect our schools."
• Property owners. Parkdale-High Park is one of the areas of Toronto hardest hit by skyrocketing assessments.

It was, accordingly, fertile ground for a pitch by the Coalition After Property Tax Reform, which distributed some 5,000 pamphlets calling on voters to "send a message" to the politicians about high property taxes.

All these groups say they are all planning similar interventions in the 2007 general election.

For the Liberals, this represents a reversal of roles. For in the 2003 election, they were the beneficiaries as the interest groups trained their fire on the Conservatives, with devastating effect.

Now the Liberals are in power, and they are the target.

So are the Liberals doomed to meet the same fate as the Conservatives did in 2003?

Not necessarily. They still have some weapons at their disposal.

Greg Lyle, a pollster and Conservative strategist, frankly acknowledged in a presentation last week that the Liberals have "a huge opportunity" to regain the upper hand by defining Conservative Leader John Tory in their own terms.

According to a survey conducted by Lyle's Innovative Research Group, only about half of Ontario voters have a firm impression of Tory.

Among that half, the prevailing view of Tory is positive, but for the rest, he is an unknown quantity.

And the Liberals could try to fill that vacuum by portraying Tory as Mike Harris redux.

Certain Tory positions play into this strategy. For instance, Tory, faintly echoing Harris' calls for tax cuts, has promised to repeal the health premium, which raises about $2.5 billion annually for the provincial treasury.

But the Liberals could — and, indeed, already have — argued that this would take $2.5 billion out of the provinces hospitals and turn the clock back to the "bad old days" of health care under Harris.

Tory has also promised to restore some version of Harris' private school tax credit. The Liberals will argue that the money for this will come straight out of public schools.

The challenge for the Conservatives will be to explain these policies in ways that make it difficult for the Liberal attacks to succeed and to define Tory himself as a new kind of Conservative leader with a non-ideological agenda.

The Conservatives might also turn the tables on the Liberals by defining Dalton McGuinty as a premier who flip-flops and makes unrealistic promises — two arguments that would have resonance with the voters, according to Lyle's polling.

In other words, the election campaign will likely be a battle of images.

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