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Another election campaign is just around the corner

Martin Regg Cohn Twitter: @reggcohn

Time to savour the post-election peace and the slower pace.

Except in Ontario, where the pre-election race now picks up where it left off.

Get ready for more of the same, more or less: After a five week federal campaign, we are barely eight months away from a provincial vote next June.

While the party lines of the four major provincial parties do differ from those of their federal cousins, brace yourself for a reprise and a rematch all the same. With all the fallout from the federal vote, the battle lines are being redrawn across the province.

In fact, the federal campaign pre-empted Ontario’s preelection contest, which was well underway this summer until Monday’s election got in the way.

Instead of working the barbecue circuit and road-testing their stump speeches, the four major party leaders were all sidelined.

Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford went unseen and the NDP’s Andrea Horwath went unremarked. Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca remained unknown and the Greens’ Mike Schreiner went unnoticed.

Ford kept his head down to avoid making himself a target for federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who gleefully used the premier as a punching bag in the last campaign (but steered clear of him this time). With all eyes on the federal race, Horwath seemed to go underground and Del Duca seemingly stayed under wraps.

The federal campaign not only distracted the provincial media, it detracted from voters’ limited attention span for Ontario politics, and subtracted from the expected fundraising frenzy ahead of the scheduled June vote. Ford pulled the curtain even lower by delaying the return of the legislature until next month.

Now, the rival leaders will be making up for lost time and trying to make up lost ground. That means reintroducing themselves to voters, differentiating themselves from their provincial rivals while sometimes distancing themselves from their unpopular federal cousins.

With federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh rising in popularity, Horwath can be expected to draw nearer. Ford, however, drew a line in the sand to insulate himself from disagreements with federal Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole — notably on vaccination certification.

After initially dragging his feet about mandating jabs in the arm, the premier belatedly embraced vaccine passports, required shots for public servants and demanded that his own MPPs take one for the team. O’Toole, by contrast, let his candidates do as they pleased on vaccinations without even having to disclose.

As for Horwath, it’s hard to say whether Singh’s growing personal popularity, as measured by public opinion polls, would rub off on the provincial NDP any more than it has translated to seats for the federal party in Ontario. Singh won only six of the province’s 121 ridings in 2019, despite his Brampton political roots, and the early numbers this time hardly suggest an Ontario orange wave that would help Horwath.

Nor can Del Duca look to his federal counterpart for a bump. Trudeaumania 2.0 has run its course — the prime minister’s photo and name were pointedly absent from many ridings, even in the party’s traditional GTA strongholds, suggesting Del Duca will be left to his own devices.

Schreiner, too, will have his work cut out for him after the erosion — if not implosion — of Green support nationally. Like federal leader Annamie Paul, Schreiner punches above his weight when facing his adversaries, but the Greens have become their own worst enemies of late (expect Schreiner, like Ford, to distance himself from his conflicted cousins at the federal level as he focuses on being reelected in his Guelph riding).

Two other ramifications for Ontario:

First, there is good reason to believe the province is headed for a minority government after the June 2, election, with none of the major parties able to eke out a majority on its own. The lesson of the latest federal results is that voters want the leaders to make minority government work, and are disinclined toward doovers merely for the sake of winning a majority.

Second, the steady growth of the fringe People’s Party of Canada within Ontario’s borders suggests that other outliers may do well in next year’s provincial election. A populist in his own right, Ford has driven dissenters out of his caucus — usually for the right reasons — but it may yet cost him support among far-right voters.

With the federal results just starting to sink in, it’s now the turn of the provincial players to sink or swim. Amid the federal post-election tranquility, the only certainty is that politics is increasingly uncertain — and Ontario politics may prove more unpredictable than ever over the next eight months.

VOTE 2021

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2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://torontostar.pressreader.com/article/281633898377764

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