By John Bkila (NewsHooked) | Saturday, June 9, 2018 at 16:54
After 15 years of being blanketed in red, the province is back in blue with a new PC-majority government — the question now: are any Ontarians going to be left out in the cold, as a result?
With only unofficial results to go on right now, slightly more than half of eligible voters (58 per cent) opted to go with the only party that waited until days before election day to put out a “costed” platform and then still not say how exactly it will be paid for.
So, what does that say about the majority of Ontarians who voted for them? Simply put, they wanted change at any cost.
They wanted change so much, they pretty much obliterated the Liberal party like the Death Star giving them only seven out of an available 124 seats, stripping it of its official “recognized party” status.
Pouring salt on the wound, they only needed eight seats to keep it — now that’s some message.
The number of electoral districts was bumped up from 107 to 124 for this year’s provincial election — the PCs nabbed 76 (63 was needed for a majority) and the NDP became the official opposition party with 40 seats.
The Conservatives knew the province wanted change, that much is clear, and it’s the only reason I could come up with as to why leader Doug Ford was not afraid of not telling folks how he planned to pay for his plan because, frankly, people didn’t care that they didn’t know.
It was probably also smart not to repeat the mistake of predecessor Tim Hudak, who thought it wise to verbally vomit his plan to cut 100,000 public-sector jobs just days before the 2014 election — shocker, how they lost that one.
And the “fear the orange” scare tactics combined with a splitting of the progressive vote meant the NDP would be relegated to official opposition.
Though, it’s not like the NDP would have secured a (majority) victory with 47 seats.
But while just looking at the seats numbers, it would seem Ford’s PCs won by a landslide, the popular vote tells a different story with the blues getting 40.6 per cent of the vote, followed by the Andrea Horwath-led NDP at 33.7 per cent.
According to a Toronto Star article, that difference was about one out of every 20 voters in the province.
With only a couple of days in the aftermath of that horse-race of an election and campaign period, what’s the take away from all this?
Could the results have been any different if more of the 9.9 million registered electors came out to vote?
Although they couldn’t legally vote, more than 280,000 elementary and high school students took part in a mock vote and elected a majority NDP government with 66 seats (32 per cent of the vote), followed by the PCs with 45 seats (27 per cent), the Liberals with 11 seats (19 per cent) and the Greens taking two seats — in reality, the Ontario Green Party won a single seat in Ontario’s Legislature Thursday night.
So, take from that what you will.
But the PCs were elected and we’re still here with the world still turning, so I, for one, am hoping they will “clean up the mess in government and restore respect for taxpayers,” as promised.
And if they fail? Well, I’m pretty sure that’s what the Liberals are hoping for so they can sing-song to us “I told ya so” and attempt to regain some semblance of power four years from now.
Featured top photo “Richly coloured sky over calm sea photo” by Paul Morris on Unsplash
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