Honesty Is the Best Policy

Results are in on the Ontario provincial election.

Before her concession, the polls showed Wynne's Liberals on track to win just one seat.

She finished with seven.

Warren Kinsella is now officially an idiot.

Wynne, Lose, or Draw Poker

Warren Kinsella, the ultimate Liberal backroom eminence, was on TV last night saying how incredibly dumb it was of Kathleen Wynne to concede the upcoming Ontario election. CBC Radio Ontario had a call-in about how dumbfounded Liberals were.

I don’t get it. According to the polls on the day she made the announcement, the Liberals were on track to win one seat.

At worst, then, what did she possibly have to lose by telling the truth?

So, okay, if it was a bad idea, the Liberals come in with no seats at all. They lost exactly one. Not a huge price to pay for being honest with the voters, surely. Is honesty worth so little to Kinsella and other Liberals?

And if they come in with more than one seat, it will have turned out to be a good idea on purely tactical grounds. Leaving aside the trivial matter of actually doing what is right.

We’ll see.

Vote for Me, Because I'm Going to Lose Anyway

Wynne or Lose.

Kathleen Wynne’s new campaign strategy looks brilliant. It may not help, but it is a darned good try.

Conventionally, party leaders always insist they are running to form a government. They generally insist they have a good chance to win.

Wynne has openly conceded the election. Instead, she is arguing that it is safe to vote Liberal, since they are not going to win anyway. So it is a safe place to park your vote if you are scared by either the NDP or the Tories. Vote Liberal to keep either in a minority position, so they can be moderated.

This sales spiel has the great virtue of being disarmingly honest. And it makes sense. You hate the NDP, so you vote Tory to keep them out. But then you may be left with a Tory government that is more radical than you really want. You hate the Tories, so you vote NDP to keep them out. But then you may be left with an NDP government that is more radical than you really want.

So what if you also hate the Liberals? They’re not going to win anyway. It is a way of voting “none of the above.” And a more meaningful way than just voting Green. Because the Liberals really would have a realistic hope of holding either of the other parties to a minority position.

If the polls are right, and agree with common perceptions, there is more mobility between NDP and Liberal support than between Liberal and Tory. In other words, if this appeal gets more votes for the Liberals, they are more likely to come from the NDP. But that’s okay, too—the NDP looks to be leading in the current polls, so Wynne’s argument still looks solid.

Meanwhile, the other two parties are going to be hammering at one another for being too radical. Strengthening Wynne’s argument. Cumulatively, they are both now saying “vote Liberal.”

Whoever in the Liberal war rooms came up with this concept deserves a lot of credit.

And no, I am not urging anyone to vote Liberal here. This is not an endorsement, just an appreciation of a game well played.

Ontario Leaders' Debate

I gather the conventional wisdom is that NDP leader Andrea Horvath won the recent Ontario leaders’ debate.

Probably true, but unsurprising. Like Tania Granic Allen in the PC leadership debates, she was the one candidate free to say anything interesting. She was not going to be elected, and could not be held to account for any promises made. She had nothing to lose.

By contrast, Doug Ford’s job was intrinsically less inspiring. He was on course to win big; his task was to sound reassuring and to promise nothing specific that was going to come back to haunt him.

Kathleen Wynne too has little chance to win, but she is still not free to say what she wants. She has a record with which she is saddled, and which she had to defend. Were she to come up with any extravagant new promises, or new policies, the rejoinder would have been obvious: so why haven’t you done it in the last fifteen years?

Given that math, Horvath was bound to “win,” if nobody made a major mistake, and all candidates did what they needed to do as well as they could.

What troubled me most in listening to the debate was that small government had no defender. It was not in Ford’s interest to point out ideological differences: he is on track to beat Wynne sheerly on scandal and perceived incompetence. So he did not differ much from either of the other two, both on the left. But as a result, the impression was left that the answer to any problem was to spend more government money on it, and pass more government regulation. For the most part, nobody cared to point out that money did not come from nowhere, and if the government did not spend it, it did not disappear.