Preville on Politics

Posts with category ‘Provincial Election’

The top five political miscalculations of 2007

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Philip Preville

A look back at the year that was, through the lens of failure:

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Up Your MMP

Posted on October 12, 2007 by Philip Preville

Today’s newspaper punditry is insisting that the issue of electoral reform is dead. Fine. I’ll shut up about it too, after these last words.

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How Rude

Posted on October 11, 2007 by Philip Preville

On TVO last night Steve Paikin asked me for my take on the election results, but before I could answer I was pre-empted by Dalton McGuinty’s victory speech. I wish the premier would not jump the queue like that. Anyway, what I was trying to tell Paikin was this: for all the constant conflict between Toronto’s downtown and its inner suburbs, or between the 416 and the 905 regions, last night the entire GTA spoke with one voice and voted overwhelmingly Liberal. And they did so despite the fact that the Liberals basically promised them nothing—no new commitments on uploading, no money for social housing or transit operating costs, nothing. The Liberals have been given carte blanche a mandate to do whatever they want in the GTA and with the GTA—to treat the GTA as its plaything or, more likely, as some kind of massive urban experiment. Which could actually be good news, because the GTA’s prosperity has become far too important to be entrusted to its small, petty local governments.

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Risky Business

Posted on October 9, 2007 by Philip Preville

NDP Leader Howard Hampton began today’s final day of campaigning in Toronto with two stops at two subway stations along the TTC’s Bloor line. In both locations he stumped briefly with local candidates and shook a minimum number of hands before hopping back on his bus; rather than ride the rocket, he chose to clog up downtown streets on his way from one subway station to another. Why? Because in the subway he’d have to meet real voters, which, in the language of campaign strategists, is called a “high-risk situation.”

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Last day campaign tidbits

Posted on October 9, 2007 by Philip Preville

A few final thoughts as election day approaches:

• Howard Hampton made consecutive campaign stops this morning at two TTC stations on the same line—Chester and High Park—but didn’t ride the subway to get from one to the other. Continue...


Hampton’s tirade

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Philip Preville

NDP leader Howard Hampton lashed out at the media yesterday for paying too much attention to faith-based schooling at the expense of the real issues. This blog stands guilty as charged but unrepentant. The real issues, according to Hampton, are seniors in soiled diapers. Leaving aside the fact that soiled diapers are not the kind of thing anyone wants to talk about, ever—not to mention the fact that other “real” issues of poverty, schooling and seniors’ care have received quite a lot of attention in the newspapers, on the Web and on public-affairs programs like TVO’s The Agenda, where I will be helping with election-night coverage—there’s a perfectly good reason why such issues haven’t been as prominent: they’re a wash with voters.

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Voodoo news to me

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Philip Preville

Last night on TVO’s The Agenda, Stephen Maynard, the NDP candidate in London-Fanshawe, told Steve Paikin that the NDP would create a “Bank of Ontario” that would set its own interest rate. As policy ideas go, it is a surefire award winner for Voodoo Economics. Not even a separate Quebec envisions having its own central bank.

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Political wars on the Web

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Philip Preville

A curious bit of breaking news: the excellent political blog DemocraticSpace, a favourite of political junkies that also serves as a massive compendium of riding-by-riding information, exposed its own case of online political fraud yesterday. It appears that some Liberal Party hacks are logging on to the site and posting comments under multiple pseudonyms, in order to stack the site with Liberal-friendly spin. (It is with stunning conviction that such Liberals agree with themselves and their alter egos. “You are so right Ron!!!” writes Mark, even though both happen to be the same person.) Yet this is just one of many hot spots along the political battlefront of the World Wide Web, which is riddled with two-bit spies and vandals. And the best cat fights are often to be found amid Wikipedia’s political biographies.

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The five stages of tax grief

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Philip Preville

It was the psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross who first mapped out the five stages of grief, which we experience with the death of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As with death, so it goes with taxes. The loss of disposable income is its own trauma. When a new tax is introduced, citizens would rather pretend it’s not happening; when forced to confront it, we get angry, and we’ll rage, rage against any new tax until someone calmly ushers us through the rest of the grieving process. That, in a nutshell, is what Mayor David Miller did last night.

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What’s up John Tory’s sleeve now?

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Philip Preville

Shortly after I wrote Friday afternoon’s post, the dam broke. Within an hour I was handed the results of a poll that showed the Liberals at 43 per cent—their highest level of support all year—and the Tories down to 33 per cent and bleeding. So what looked like a stalemate on Friday now looks like a runaway Liberal majority. At noon today, John Tory will make an announcement designed to make the issue of faith-based schools go away. Good luck.

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What’s up John Tory’s sleeve?

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Philip Preville

The latest polls and projections show the Liberals moving into majority territory, making gains at the expense of the Conservatives. I’ve just been emailing friend and fellow blogger John Lorinc about how dull the campaign has become. Everyone has been sticking to their one-note scripts (McGuinty: faith-based schools are bad; Tory: breaking promises is bad; Hampton: breaking promises is bad for working families). Stalemate. As long as the lines of attack don’t change, nor will the direction of the polls, which have had the Liberals on a slow but steady climb since the summer. I wrote Lorinc that Tory, who must surely be as bored with his own campaign as the rest of Ontario, will need to go out on a limb soon. That’s when Lorinc put forward this intriguing proposition:

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Another argument for faith-based schooling

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Philip Preville

I have previously pointed out that all John Tory’s arguments in favour of faith-based schools are purely secular. They are also uninspiringly bureaucratic: teacher certification, standardized testing, school-board oversight. The closest he gets to mounting a spirited defence of his policy is when he says “it’s the right thing to do,” by which he means fairness (fund all faiths or fund no faiths), which is also tepid. Since Tory seems unwilling to mount a more passionate secular defense of faith-based schooling, I’ll do it.

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The case for MMP

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Philip Preville

Here’s a link to an entry in James Bow’s always-thoughtful blog that links to Andrew Coyne’s column on the issue of mixed-member proportional representation, which is the electoral system that Ontario will adopt if a majority of ballots are cast in its favour on October 10. Coyne’s column struck me as funny because he cannot hide his boredom with the existing first-past-the-post system. Yet his perspective is typical. While most Ontarians know little about the MMP proposal, those who do—like Coyne, and Bow, and me, and every other political junkie in Ontario except Sheila Copps—have invested great hope in its success, believing it to be the cure for many of our democracy’s ills.

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Stop nodding, Dalton!

Posted on September 21, 2007 by Philip Preville

I watched the leaders' debate last night not as a journalist—in an office, with other journalists, in stony silence, listening to every word—but in situ, in my home, amid my normal routine. Which is to say, I listened to the first half-hour on the radio while feeding my son his supper in the kitchen and the rest on TV, leaving the room intermittently to help a tired mother deal with a fussy, tired kid. In other words, for parts of the debate I was either listening without watching or watching without listening and constantly multi-tasking but always paying attention.

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How to watch an election debate

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Philip Preville

Coverage of election debates always focuses on a single, false question: Who won? Debates are never so cut-and-dried as to produce a clear winner—there are too many exchanges, some of them quite detailed and complex, and each leader always scores a few points for their team by the time the final bell sounds. What debates can do, however, is make an accusation stick: they offer the best chance to pierce a rival’s armour and inflict a political wound. By the end of Thursday night’s debate between the three main party leaders, the question that will matter most is: Do you believe, as John Tory and Howard Hampton keep saying, that Dalton McGuinty cannot be trusted? Because if voters still aren’t buying that line on Friday morning, they’ll likely never buy it.

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The tax debate meets the race for Queen's Park

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Philip Preville

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This morning Mayor David Miller, flanked by a bevy of city councillors and surrounded by a supportive audience, launched a public education campaign on his taxation proposal—now called the Fair Tax Plan. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for the last four months knows that this initiative comes about four months too late, but oh well. Better now than never. And yet, it could end before it has barely begun: council is not scheduled to vote on the tax plan before October 22, but Miller is now calling for a special meeting of council to vote on the new taxes before the end of September.

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Minority Report

Posted on September 4, 2007 by Philip Preville

There were no brownouts in August. In fact, to John Tory’s misfortune, we’ve had a remarkably mild summer, with most nights pleasantly cool. With no outward and visible signs of utter mismanagement by the McGuinty Liberals, recent polls are inconclusive at best. Some claim a minority of some sort, while internal Liberal polls show them in the 40% range, which is near majority territory. Today’s Star lists 15 key ridings, but far more than 15 ridings need to swing to produce a minority for any party. For Tory, just like the mayoral election in 2003, it will all come down to the last three weeks of the campaign. Back then, if he’d had an extra week to campaign, he’d have won. Let’s see if he gets the timing right this time.

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Author Bio Pic

Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.


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