Monday, June 11, 2018

The big sad

Many of my friends are sad these days.  The provincial election did not go as we had hoped and our new government will be a Conservative one.  The people of Ontario decided to elect a party that never published a complete platform, made promises that are completely impossible, and is led by a buffoon, Doug Ford.  I wouldn't vote Conservative in any case, but there was a whole list of other contenders for leader I would have been vastly less harsh on.

I am sure people have lots of reasons for voting Conservative.  Mostly they seem to be terror at what a left wing party would do; these are usually pitched as fiscal concerns.  Many people claim that their Conservative vote was to protect Ontario's finances from the NDP.

I don't buy that crap.

The NDP published a properly costed platform.  The Conservatives published a list of promises that didn't even come close to adding up.  Economists on all political sides agreed that the Conservative promises were ridiculous and would lead to enormous deficits, higher than the other parties'.  If the Conservatives had actually published their numbers then perhaps they could have refuted these criticisms, but since they did not, we can only go with our best guesses.

You could also look at the party's history and see that they have no track record of financial responsibility.  Across North America deficits and foolish spending are not attached to any particular political party or even a leaning, left or right.  I would love to say that left wing governments are better this way, but we all know that every party wastes money and has financial scandals, and the data supports this.

You *can* choose how parties throw your money around though.  Right wingers will tend to throw it at rich people and shareholders, while left wingers will throw it at poor people.

I know which way I would prefer it, and I don't stand to benefit from helping the poor, quite the opposite.

So why vote Conservative?  Well, there are three reasons, I think.  Bigotry first among them.  Ford in particular is terrible for promoting bigotry and I am sure the fact that the three party leaders were two women and one man did some extra heavy lifting to get the misogyny vote out.  Lots of people want to vote for bigotry but few will actually admit it; these people of course often defend their position with "But what about fiscal responsibility?" and ignore the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that the Conservatives are better that way in general, and in this particular election they are far worse.

Some people really do vote for fiscal responsibility, and it isn't just a shield for bigotry.  These people are just misinformed or ignorant of the facts of the case here; I am sure there are times when you would actually be voting in a more fiscally responsible government by voting for the right, but this certainly wasn't one of those times.

And then there are those that vote for the right simply because they always have.  It is a tribal thing, and has nothing to do with policy of any sort.  There are simply people that always vote one way, and these folks are found in all parties.  I think their way of deciding who to vote for is terrible, but I am not the sort of person who is particularly into tribalism as moral compass.

Hard to say how much of what elected the Conservatives is evil, how much is clueless, and how much is random tribalism.  No matter the case, it makes me sad.  It won't affect me much directly, except insofar as they wreck the finances of the province, but it makes me so mad that they clearly intend to go after those who are vulnerable to placate the part of the electorate who did vote for them on the basis of bigotry.

We will get through this - there have been plenty of Conservative governments before, with similar goals.  But still I wish that the people of my province were better than this.

5 comments:

  1. If your interested in reading about why people said they voted PC, I read: https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/06/12/what-made-ontarians-vote-for-doug-ford.html

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  2. Yeah, I wonder if people voted Conservative because they are tired of being talked down to like this? :-)

    You could, you know, *ask* a Conservative why they voted that way. The struggle that I suspect we both have is finding one. It's as if we live in a bubble or something.

    As the article says - some people want cheaper gas prices. They are paying too much for power. They somehow think that they can get these cheaper without government subsidies (or removal of taxes, which is the same).

    Some older voters refuse to believe whatever the NDP says after living through the early 1990s when they were in power. It's hard to argue with their experience - they were burned once!

    Some voters are convinced that Wynne has been bad for business with the minimum wage increase. How do you convince someone that their small business is not economically viable and should be shut down? That's pretty tricky.

    Maybe voters are tired about always talking about Toronto issues. Spending billions on subways they'll never ride on. It's tough to appreciate the economic boost that Toronto gives to everyone.

    Maybe some voters were raised their entire lives to believe something about sex and they are as uncomfortable with their kids learning the new curriculum as you are with your kids not learning it. They know the Liberals and NDP aren't going to change it, so that's their single issue to vote on, and there's only one party.

    The Star (and possibly other press) kept focusing on the PC platform not being costed. I got tired of hearing about it. Politicians lie constantly during elections, either because they are evil, clueless or tribal (to use your words) so who cares how they are paying for a made-up platform that will never happen? The PCs told people what they wanted to do, and how much it might cost, and that was enough. It resonated with their day-to-day concerns.

    Some people probably voted for Ford just because so many people call him a buffoon, and when he's saying things that they are thinking, it means you're calling them a buffoon, you elitist city-dweller. I suspect you're not going to sway them over to your side with that kind of approach...

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  3. I feel like the problem isn't that people know that politicians lie so much as that people believe them.

    One party/candidate promised to get the finances in order, reduce taxes, lower hydro costs, lower gas costs, and have cheap beer... all without anyone losing their jobs or any other taxes going up. That sounds great, if you believe that and you focus on fiscal over social, that is the candidate you should vote for, and that was Doug Ford's platform. I feel like he won, at least partially, because he promised people things they wanted and they believed him.

    The problem I have is that experts pretty clearly said that was hogwash and not possible, that his promises were ludicrous (from a fiscal point of view). But that didn't matter because people believed him and not the experts, because that's how populism works.

    I don't know how to solve this problem, but we see it larger in Trump. He promises people things they want to hear, blames the "other", and riles people up. It doesn't matter that most of the things he says are demonstrably false, it doesn't matter how much time other people spend proving he's wrong. People like to hear things they want to hear, and it appears that they'll vote for people who tell them what they want to hear.

    Doug Ford is a buffoon, and of course the fiscal things he promised were good, of course people want hydro to be lower and gas to be lower and beer to be lower, but seeing as that isn't actually possible and everyone with any experience in the field said that, maybe we should occasionally listen to experts.

    Snuggles

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  4. Also ha... you tagged this post as "scams", that's clever.

    Snuggles

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