Ontaria elected a goggle-eyed pale-faced lipless toad to run their government this week, one who takes pride in his regressive ideas and is a kind of Trump Lite. I was kind of thinking of making a Nelson Muntz “Ha-Ha!” remark, but I can’t. I just can’t.
I’m so sorry, friends to the North. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
This is a terrible result for us in Ontario. Just shows we have our share of Trumpites. Ugh. Glad to say my riding voted in the Green Party candidate.
The NDP and Liberals split the vote on the left, which allowed the Progressive Conservatives with 40% of the vote to get a majority of seats in the province. If history is any guide, the lesson those on the left will take from this is to bicker more.
Yes, it’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of our electorate; a business owner and petty bully on Toronto city council gets elected primarily on a platform of (a) “Drain the swamp!” and (b) “I’ll cut gas taxes, so you can keep driving big pickups/SUVs!”
Of course, the man has no plan as to what he’s going to do to replace the revenue lost when those gas taxes are cut; actually, he has no plan of any kind at all. (Unless you count ever-increasing deficits as “a plan”…)
It would have been nice if we were offered reasonable choices. There were none.
I guess I will be able to drown my sorrows in dollar beer at least. Except that I am not a drinker. Ugh. We are screwed. :/
Honestly I do not understand why anyone voted for the Liberal party. Their leader conceded defeat days ago; they stood no chance, and the polls showed a very very close race with the vote split on the left. If a few more Liberals had voted strategically we wouldn’t be in this mess. Also if we had a more representative voting system.
Not only was Ford running on the “I’m just like Trump!” platform (he’s actually on record as claiming this), he also had several things in common with him:
1) Bad at business – the family business he and his brother Randy have been running into the ground has posted over a million dollars in losses every year for at least the last seven, and despite this he pays himself huge bonuses.
2) Cronyism! Several people he or his family owed favours to were just directly appointed as candidates in ridings they would never have made it into if they’d been forced to run against fellow conservatives, including the son of a former conservative premier.
3) Making crap up at random because it sounds good for him and bad for his opponents – claims that the NDP would raise the gas tax by 38 cents/litre were pulled from nowhere, along with numerous other accusations
4) No idea how to government: His promisses mostly amount to stripping the provincial government of all sources of revenue while somehow also reducing wait times at hospitals (by closing them all due to lack of funding?)
5) Appeal to the uneducated masses “WOO! CHEAP BEER! VOTE FOR ME!”
Ontario is in for some rough years. Fortunately, most of my salary comes from federal funding, but since I’m in the university research/education sector, it’s still going to hit us pretty hard when the province runs out of money because of an idiot.
It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
We know.
We already had Harper, federally, who in many ways was a Trump with a nastier streak but some brains. Based on the Harper years, we could see a lot of the internal problems the USA has currently looming as Trump was elected.
Now we get Dougie the Frenzied Woodchuck. A leader who is much closer to Donald Trump in intelligence, personality and morals. God Save Ontario.
At the moment, probably the best we can hope for is that he self-destructs early but it is hard to see PC MPPs voting for a non-confidence motion.
I wonder what housing costs are in Gatineau or, perhaps, the Eastern Townships?
Fortunately Ontario isn’t the whole of Canada and I live on the west coast where we have managed to escape the “neoliberal/neoconservative” grip for possibly a few years. Unfortunately we don’t have a “checks and balances” system and Ford gets to wield unchecked power within his domain. It’s going to be a bad few years in Ontario and likely some nasty contagion on the rest of us.
@3: I think it’s clear where the money will come from. As with his brother — and every politician everywhere who has run on “finding efficiencies” — he will fail to find free money and therefore engage in austerity budgets. Rob Ford failed because the Toronto mayor has very limited power.
It’s going to be a rough few years over there. Much as I think Toronto is a dumpster fire, they don’t deserve whatever the hell Ford is planning to do. His lack of a written platform let MLA candidates tell everyone everything they wanted to hear without even pretending to tether to reality. Dollar beers! Buck a litre for gas! Efficiencies! Folks folks folks! Step right up!
We’ll get corruption scandals every other week and he’ll blame everything on the Liberals. :/
Because BC doesn’t have to hear ENOUGH about Ontario’s politics, now we’re in for four years of OMG YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT DOUGIE SAID THIS MORNING.
Yeah, we can’t be quite so smug anymore…
On the positive side, in my riding, the elected MPP:
https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/06/07/jill-andrew-looks-set-to-capture-toronto-st-pauls-for-ndp.html
@11 Rob Bos
Toronto is a dumpster fire, they don’t deserve whatever the hell Ford is planning to do
Can we get back to you on the Toronto issue? The ROO (Rest of Ontario) is still discussing this.
Ontario, as a whole, is going down the hole with Dougie. Mike Harris, a relatively sane Con, managed to almost wreak the hospital system, buggered up the educational system and reformed the welfare system so well that people died. Dougie is a few orders of magnitude worse than Mike Harris was.
We barely get rid of Harper federally and we get a feral rodent like Dougie the Frenzied Woodchuck provincially. Sheesh.
@bryanfeir: I guess we are in the same riding. I was also glad she won.
He supports the “Stop the New Sex-Ed Agenda” though not the party obviously which horrifyingly managed 86 votes in our riding. Unbelievable. Luckily we went NDP no matter how hard they have been working to put more condos in it. He also has the religious votes.
I’m hoping the legalizing pot will get me through. Wonder what that costs nowadays. ;)
Ford is yet another in the current crop of misogynistic cowards who hides behind claims of protecting ‘free expression’ or defending the ‘sanctity of life’ while pushing laws that will inevitably kill women, and contribute to the procreative enslavement of those they don’t kill. He doesn’t even have the courage or personal integrity to admit that he is motivated by a desire to control women, not ‘save’ fetuses. A detestable little man with a dangerous amount of power ceded to him, and people like him seem to be popping up like a rash all across the world at the moment.
Not to worry! Alberta still has… Oh fuck. We’re getting Jason Kenney in our next election.
mrshinyandnew @6:
I prefer the NDP, but in my riding, if me and 81 other likeminded folk had voted NDP instead of Liberal, we would now have a PC MPP. Of course, one could also say that if me and 2,000 other likeminded folk voted NDP instead of Liberal, we’d have an NDP MPP. Complicated innit.
It’s frustrating when people focus on (say) the 1,000 people who voted Green rather than the 100,000 people who voted Conservative, for a Conservative win. Like… c’mon. Really? If you’re going to blame anyone, blame the actual Conservative voters for falling for the con artist.
I mean, yes, it is trivially true that if the Green voters voted NDP or Liberal, you’d have a different MLA. But it’s also fucking true that if 1000 NDP or Liberal voters or Conservative voters voted differently, you’d ALSO have a different MLA. Why focus on the one group?
Is Doug Ford related to Rob Ford of crack pipe fame?
@22: They were brothers. For some reason, when you elect your right-wing would-be despot, you also have to be sure to pick the most pathetic version of that available. It’s the American way, and the Canadian way is to make the same mistake a few years later.
@22 Capoccia: Yes, though it seems that money is thicker than blood in that family. Rob’s widow and family are going after Doug in court for bad business management and possibly intercepted inheritance monies.
Their faces looked very similar, so I thought they might have been related
@22: In addition to what monad and Strewth mentioned, Doug and Rob also ran their own radio show in the Toronto area that was basically a (mildly) less insane version of Alex Jones’ crap.
@19 Rob Grigjanis
Yeah it’s not complicated. Having an Liberal MPP will do nothing for you. So you and those 2000-odd people should have voted NDP, just like in my riding, the thousands who voted for Liberal should have also voted NDP. In our system it makes basically no sense at all to vote for the local candidate instead of voting for the leader and the party as a whole.
Can’t P.M. J.Trudeau swoop in to save French Canada, as he is thwarted from swooping in to save the US from “Master of Cheese” (to quote Kellyann ConWhey [sic] ), as so many patriots wish?
Being American, I have no idea how parliamentary government works, sorry for my brainfart.
?
mrshinyandnew @27:
With a massive PC majority, it will do about as much as having an NDP MPP. One less PC will have to do for now.
Yeah, I’ll pass on your wisdom to the 2,000 next time we meet for coffee. Actually, in my riding there probably weren’t another 2,000 such people. It’s been heavily Liberal for the last few years, but polls showed that a lot of those who voted Liberal had PC as second choice. That played a major role in my choice.
@28: Sadly, the PM can do nothing here, provincial politics are not an area where he has any authority – and he’s already got his hands full with Alberta and BC glaring daggers at each other over top of the mountains. (And Quebec is French Canada, along with a bit of the maritime provinces like Nova Scotia. Ontario is almost entirely english speaking.)
We’ve basically got a similar structure to the US in regards to our provincial vs federal levels of government, in that the provinces have areas they’re in charge of, and the federal government is concerned with different areas, as well as the interactions between the provinces. It’s why Quebec was allowed to make english signs illegal a while back, even in the english-only communities in the province. (Technically you’re allowed _some_ english on signs, but the French has to be bigger, and you can’t have more english than french.)
@30, There’s nearly 500k out of 13.5Million of us French Canadians living in Ontario. Mostly in the Ottawa, Sudbury and Northern Claybelt regions.
@31: So about the same number as the population of primary Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin ~250k each) speakers in Toronto, and slightly less than the number of English-only speakers in Quebec. (600k out of 8M)
Either way though, there’s no way for Trudeau to help us with the problems we’ve just saddled ourselves with.
Yeah… Dougie said; “We took Ontario back!” … dogwhistle MAGA bullshit, le sigh.
To quote the great philosopher Dark Helmet:
Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.
A Men!
@22 Chris Capoccia
Is Doug Ford related to Rob Ford of crack pipe fame?
Rob was the likeable and competent brother.
Martin Lefebvre @31: It was while talking with a Franco-Ontarian years ago that I first heard the phrase les gens oubliés.
@30
You meant New Brunswick.
So not illegal then.
tatin #37
A-tu un point?
@30-HappyHead
(And Quebec is French Canada, along with a bit of the maritime provinces like Nova Scotia. Ontario is almost entirely english speaking.)
Thought English was predominant in one of my ancestral homelands Nova Scotia. Glad to hear French is still spoken in Acadia. I know where our Merkin Cajuns came from.
I have Scots Irish ancestry and hate the Orange bastards that may pollute my bloodline too. Long story.
And us Merkins have deep unacknowledged debt to French help in our Revolution. Still doesn’t excuse the post WWII reclamation of Indochina. But Freedom Fries are totally on us. Sorry.
chigau @38
Just setting the record straight.
@37
Last I’d heard (stopped paying attention to Quebec years ago, despite living next door in Ottawa), Quebec does have “language police” to impose fines on businesses that run afoul of their “language laws”. While arguing that the rest of Canada should be fully bilingual, signs in Quebec must have at least as much French as English, and French must be at least twice as large. This video from ’60 minutes’ is from 30 or 40 years ago, but it should give you an idea of what’s going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxeQpGasEME
tatin # 40
Ah, わかりました。
Bénisse votre cœur.
Maybe Russia attacked your elections as well? This so sucks in the US right now.
Don’t be surprised if you find some Russian footprints around your elections systems. They’ve discovered a weakness — our elections systems aren’t hackproof by a large margin. Then again, you might have been victimized by micro-targeted electioneering. Trump won in the USA by about 80,000 votes spread over three states — districts which were micro-targeted. The left need to get off their butts, stop shooting each other in the foot, hold their nose and vote for the good rather than the perfect. Or event the “not as bad as X” rather than the good.
Re : the above from me: Where I say “our election systems” I refer primarily to the USA and Canada.