In the midst of a mayoral campaign that saw his province’s largest city elect his polar opposite, Dalton McGuinty tried his best to make sense of these very angry times.
“I think there’s some genuine anxiety out there, and understandably so,” the Ontario Premier said a couple of weeks ago, perched stiffly behind the immaculate desk of his immaculate office. “Even if you didn’t lose your job, if you’re one of the two-thirds of Ontarians who don’t have a pension, you lost savings. Even if you’ve earned most of that back now, you are a changed person. You are less secure, less confident. And I understand that.”
Then the most successful Liberal leader that Ontario has seen since the Second World War shifted from the empathetic to his slightly sterrner self. “My challenge is to convince Ontarians that the old world is not coming back,” he said, “and that we need to do things together to grow stronger, and some of these are not easy to do.”
It was the sort of line – earnest, upstanding, even noble – that endears Mr. McGuinty to his admirers. And it reflected a perspective that the man labelled “Premier Dad,” a term evocative of his somewhat overbearing manner of trying to look out for Ontarians’ interests, is physically incapable of shedding.
But there are signs, more of them by the day, that paternal guidance isn’t what voters are looking for in their leaders. On the contrary, Mr. McGuinty’s very nature appears to put him diametrically at odds with a political mood that is hardening.
Toronto’s newly elected mayor identified that anger and the anxiety. Rob Ford fed into it and preyed on it, telling voters in the simplest terms possible that the current crop of politicians were to blame for all their problems, that there were easy solutions that required no sacrifices, that soon they would be able to pay less to their government and get better services in return. In return for his efforts, he blew opponent George Smitherman, Mr. McGuinty’s former deputy premier, right out of the water.
In the Liberal fortress of Toronto, where Mr. McGuinty will need to win nearly every seat in next year’s election to earn a third straight majority government, this cannot bode well. A vituperative electorate is shifting allegiances toward politicians who pledge to protect their pocketbooks – not those who speak loftily, as he does, about appealing to their “enlightened self-interest.” At a time when voters are looking for someone to feel their pain, Mr. McGuinty is more likely to tell them to pull up their socks.
In the provincial election campaign that will begin little more than 10 months from now, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak will likely make a similar pitch to Mr. Ford’s, albeit more nuanced. And considering that it retailed well on the doorsteps of Toronto, where the Tories don’t currently have a single federal or provincial seat, it’s not a stretch to imagine it finding an audience in the outer regions of suburbia, in smaller cities and in rural Ontario.
Mr. McGuinty, who has been underestimated many times, may yet navigate his way past the anti-incumbent fervour that has spread across from New Brunswick to British Columbia, not to mention south of the border. At the moment, though, he appears almost uniquely ill-suited to overcome the wave surging toward him. The same life experience that allowed him to become arguably the most successful Liberal politician of his generation now appears to conspire with his opponents against him.
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“He thinks it was normal,” a former staffer says of Mr. McGuinty’s upbringing. In other words, far from it. He is a better person than most of us, or at least more virtuous. Most of us didn’t grow up the oldest son in an Irish-Catholic family with 10 kids. Most of us didn’t work summers at a family-run kids’ camp or volunteer to assist elderly patients at the local hospital. And most of us didn’t get the value of community service driven into us at the dinner table by saintly mothers working as nurses for mentally ill teenagers or by fathers who dragged us out in the middle of the night to plant gardens for kids at the local hospital to enjoy.
