The Ontario election result should leave me happy. After all, I was mostly just hoping that the Conservatives wouldn't be elected and not only did I get that but the Liberals that I voted for have a solid majority. My Facebook feed is full of my friends celebrating that anybody but the Conservatives won, which should tell you how badly their campaign strategy backfired. Pandering to the extreme base alienated the middle of the road folks in a big way. When the election goes like this you would think I would feel good about it, but I don't so much.
We really are left with the best of the worst. Ontario still has a ludicrous, unethical, and brutally expensive Catholic school system and none of the parties was willing to actually stand up and say that it needs to go. I think the Liberals in a majority are by far the likeliest candidates to end that embarrassment because the Catholic teachers support the NDP and the Conservatives have a religious base but still I am not optimistic. I am all for fiscal responsibility and that move would be one of the best ones in that light - maintaining two sets of school boards is insupportable even if all we cared about was money, and serious state sponsored religious discrimination is a thing too!
I am hoping with a strong mandate the Liberals take on the twin roles of getting the deficit gone and forging ahead with other progressive plans. Thankfully they pledged during the campaign to push forward with the ranked ballot legislation for cities that died when the government fell so I am pleased about that. It looks like at least one really good thing will happen out of this government and I hesitate to hope for more. Given that the government can no longer blame other parties for crappy budgets and deficits I have hopes that they will get their act together there too, but I am not especially optimistic.
Also I must add that I am never going to tell a political party that I am going to vote for them ever again. They called me three bloody times on election day to tell me to vote despite me telling them every time that indeed I had already voted. Next time I get called they are getting the "I am voting for one of the other parties for sure because you are THE DEVIL" speech to make damn sure they don't bother me on election day.
Too late. You're in their data base now and will get calls during every election.
ReplyDeleteI was watching the election coverage, and as it became clear the Liberals were going to win they started talking about why they were going to win, talking about the things they had promised. Basically all of it made me cringe, especially the Ontario pension plan idea. This is the party I was hoping would win (that is that I realistically hoped would win, my truest fantastic hope was a Green majority with zero Conservative and Liberal seats), and I basically disagree with everything about them.
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ReplyDeleteCatholic Teachers don't explicitly "support the NDP", either in terms of overall vote or in terms of Federation (OECTA) support. Voting amoung education workers has traditionally been split about 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 (crazy I know.... 30% supporting conservatives?!) but conservative support waned a lot during the Mike Harris years and continues to be low. Most of those voters moved to support Liberals. The catholic teachers' union OECTA supported various candidates, mostly Liberal from what I can see. Last year the Liberal government passed Bill 115, (perhaps illegally) taking away the collective bargaining rights of education workers and OECTA made a quick move to settle with the government and undermine the collective bargaining position of all other education unions. In their agreement they had a "me too" clause that would allow them to retroactively gain the contract advantages gained by collective action by the OTHER unions who had not settled. Basically, OECTA threw the rest of us firmly under the bus and did a giant political favour for the Liberals. In this election I suspect that most Catholic teachers supported the liberals. The Public sector education workers (and OSSTF members in Catholic schools), after being so badly burned by the liberals should have been expected to strongly support the NDP, the only major party not to come hard at our working conditions in the last year, but a great many were so terrified of the Conservatives that they became staunch liberal supporters even in the wake of Bill 115. I wasn't amoung that group;)