Clearly this was more a PC loss that a Liberal win. We more or less just kept doing what we had been doing; and the huge PC lead just evaporated into the mist.
What did Hudak do wrong? Well, focusing on crime was a mistake; it's a federal matter anyway. Besides, people are not very worried about crime. Being 'tough on crime' won't lose you any votes (except mine) but it won't win you many either. More generally, Hudak offered 'change' but without a real plan; and promises to cut taxes without losing services seem weak post Mayor Ford.
The big issue left unspoken is finances. The Province is out of money -- so we need to raise taxes or cut spending. That's going to be hard.
4 comments:
Excellent post, summed it up exactly.
Now do we raise taxes, cut spending, or just keep borrowing and follow everyone else (US, Europe etc.) over the cliff?
The popular vote margin of victory wasn't by much: 37-35 (some polls predicted a 10 point rout for McGuinty, but polls always undercount Conservative support).
If Conservatives increase their pop. vote by 3-4 points it will make a huge difference, and they'll win those seats that they lost by small margins.
Hudak made some mistakes. I don't think his campaign was as bad as the pundits made it out to be. The Conservatives will have very favorable winning conditions the next time around as they can run against 10-12 years of Liberal corruption. So Hudak doesn't have to resign as leader.
Sometimes you can win in the long term by losing in the short term. We're headed towards the second dip of this Great Recession. A Conservative who takes the long view should be happy to let the McGuinty liberals inherit the proverbial manure sandwich.
Yes, the PCs should stick with Hudak -- he ran an ok campaign and did well for a first time Leader
Crime and finanaces aren't mutually exclusive. McGuinty needs to quit catering to the auto insurance lobby's fraud talk by gutting policy benfits and spiking premiumns (as he did a year ago) just because the IBC trots out its tired allegation about losing $1.3 billion per year to Ontario's legions of opportunistic fraudsters. Both the Sun and more recently the Star have put the lie to that assertion. Yet Ontario auto insurance policy is still being structured as if the $1.3 billion IBC fraud loss estimate was real rather than self-serving and wildly exaggerated. It is sad that McGuinty and Hudak and Horwath each promised to fight the $1.3 billion per year fraud losses to malingering/faking mva victims without even bothering to check the veracity of this assertion. Especially since 5 minutes of googling would show that the IBC has been trotting out this same figure since 1992. In fact Harris used it to justify Bill 198. Back then the auto insurance lobby trotted out Dr. James Sears to lend authority to the allegations about massive fraud perpetrated by faking injuries. Turns out Dr. Sears had lost his lisence to practice the year before he became the auto insurance lobby's "medical expert" on fraud. Turns out that Dr. Sears was/is "Dimitri the Lover" a wacko Toronto sex guru. So Mr. Morton - maybe when you are congratulating McGuinty you could ask him why he falls in love with whatever the IBC tells him is true - even if it says so otherwise in the press - and even if the only "medical authority" to support this number was a disgraced x-doctor. Since Sears, the IBC has not produced a single "medical authority" to stand behind its $1.3 billion figure. But hey - maybe McGuinty figures insurance lobby spin-doctors are the same as real doctors? Maybe he figures one shouldn't need a medical lisence to practice medicine. After all, his last round of legislative changes gave auto insurance adjusters the authority to reject treatment prescribed by attending psysicians if they think it might be "suspicious". I could be wrong but I would have thought that in order to know which prescribed treatments are reasonable and necessary one would need some medical training. Did McGuinty also legislate the adjusters to get some medical training? I don't think so. Dimitri the Lover as the medical authority on fraud in Ontario casualty claims! Auto insurer adjusters essentially practicing medicine. Lobbyist spin-doctors trumping the opinions of real doctors. Only in McGiunty's Ontario!! The consequent massive downloading of the costs of wrongly denied injury claims justified by bogus allegations of malingering are paid by taxpayers -via OHIP and via welfare for income replacement and prescription drugs. Why doesn't McGuinty set up a Task Force to study how much money the Ontario auto insurers are fraudulently downloading on the the public purse simply by treating most claims as fraudulent claims.
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