A new north wind:
Bishop, Jordon
REPORT FROM ONTARIO A NEW NORTH WIND SOCIAL DEMOCRATS TRIUMPH The outcome of the last month's provincial elections, in Ontario, in which the New Democratic Party won 74 of 130 seats, came as a...
...When the dust had settled, the NDP held a solid, workable majority government...
...When opinion polls put the NDP ahead of the Liberals with only a week left in the campaign, Peterson panicked and began to invoke the Red Scare: The "socialists" would drive business out of the province, jobs would be lost, and children would go hungry...
...With a hefty lead in opinion polls, he and his advisors judged that it was a good time to get another comfortable majority...
...But that the NDP could be anything but a loyal if sometimes creative opposition in Canada's heartland province of Ontario, was simply unthinkable...
...The people of Ontario have had their day...
...Woodsworth, one of the founders of the CCF...
...In 1987 Liberal Premier David Peterson called elections in the hope of obtaining a clear mandate for his government...
...By late August the Peterson campaign was in serious trouble...
...By 9:30 network computers began to report an NDP majority...
...The NDP, with a fairly steady 20 to 25 percent of the popular vote, claimed 15 or 20 of the 130 seats in the Ontario legislature...
...While they were called socialists in the campaign to frighten the electorate, there is nothing in their programs or tradition that is further left than the Canadian Catholic bishops' 1983 statement on the economy...
...There are blue-collar workers among those elected, and twenty of the seventy-four are women...
...As a version of the common European V.A.T., or Value Added Tax, it is popular with governments...
...This is incredible...
...There was conscious choice...
...In the half-century of its history, the NDP-originally known as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF-had formed governments in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and for one term in British Columbia...
...Premier Peterson himself lost his seat to Marion Boyd, the director of a home for battered women...
...The New Democrats, who call themselves democratic socialists and are part of the international socialist movement, have a long history in Canada...
...Rae is already on record to the effect that there will be no "white massacre" in the public service...
...Peterson's gamble on the polls was seen by many as a cynical and unnecessary grab for power...
...REPORT FROM ONTARIO A NEW NORTH WIND SOCIAL DEMOCRATS TRIUMPH The outcome of the last month's provincial elections, in Ontario, in which the New Democratic Party won 74 of 130 seats, came as a shock even to loyal NDP supporters...
...How could it happen...
...But if this was a protest vote, it was a protest with a difference...
...But this was not to hold...
...The Liberals already had a mandate, and while there is no fixed term in the Canadian parliamentary system, tradition gives a government four years, even five if necessary...
...The NDP held 19 and became the official opposition...
...A sort of consensus has formed to the effect that this was a protest vote, not only against the cynicism of an election call dictated by polls, but against a whole political establishment...
...As columnist Michael Valpy of the Toronto Globe and Mail noted (September 7), the turnout and the vote showed an absence of political cynicism...
...When the voting ended at 8:00 p.m...
...The elections were called for September 6. Teams of enumerators invaded neighborhoods-in Canada governments hire people to seek out eligible voters and register them-and signs began to appear on lawns...
...Sheila Copps, confidently predicted the return of a Liberal majority as late as 8:30...
...Canvassers found voters spitting mad at the Liberals...
...That statement, while anathema to many business interests, was quietly supported by all of the mainline churches in Canada...
...It had the look, everyone said, of a dull, boring campaign, drifting for five weeks in the late summer doldrums...
...Men and women who have worked in NDP ranks for decades looked at one another in astonished disbelief as the results came in...
...Whether the New Democrats can fulfill the promise is another question...
...He got it: a smashing majority of 95 seats...
...Some of the fiscal benefits of this tax would be passed on to provincial governments...
...JORDAN BISHOP Jordan Bishop, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a free-lance writer living in Ottawa.r living in Ottawa...
...They have four years to see whether another kind of politics is possible...
...The agenda will be different: the NDP has promised to raise the minimum wage, to beef up employment equity legislation, to look at a comprehensive government auto insurance program, to reintroduce inheritance taxes on estates over $1 million and to shift some of the tax burden to corporations (they are committed to a reversal of the recent trend, of shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle classes), and to tightening up and enforcing environmental legislation already on the books...
...Chief among these is the G.S.T., or Goods and Services Tax, a new national sales tax proposed by the federal government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney...
...The New Democrats did not win by default...
...Having received advance warning, in most places the Liberals got their signs out a week before the others...
...Valpy also believes that the vote witnesses to a repudiation of the politics of the eighties, of governments such as those of Brian Mulroney, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush...
...Forming a government, even a minority government, did not feel like anything in the realm of the possible...
...on September 6, many NDP supporters gathered around their televisions expecting the return of a Liberal minority government...
...If there were other reasons for calling elections, they hardly stand up to public scrutiny...
...Ostensibly, the G.S.T...
...Many observers felt that this was the only reason for the election call...
...In addition, there is the stabilizing presence of the bureaucracy...
...In part this may have been simply good tactics...
...the Conservatives took 16 seats...
...The Ontario Liberals, it is argued, wanted a new mandate before they had to deal with the G.S.T...
...Ontario NDP...
...A Liberal spokeswoman on the CBC, federal M.P...
...Rae, a Rhodes Scholar whose father was a career diplomat, hardly fits the image of the flaming radical...
...is to replace a hidden manufacturers' sales tax...
...The make-up of this government will be different...
...And yet the NDP's success in Ontario came as a shock...
...At 66 percent, voter turnout was relatively high...
...The federal Conservatives, and the style of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, have been blamed by many...
...but any government that accepts responsibility for it risks being turned out by an angry populace...
...Bob Rae, the NDP leader, suddenly found himself leading in a campaign that had become a real race...
...But in late July of this year, after only three years of government, Peterson again called general elections...
...It had worked before...
...The Conservatives' Big Blue Machine, last successfully presided over by Premier William Davis in the early eighties, ruled in Ontario for forty-three years, during which time much of the Canadian welfare state became a reality...
...To go to the country after three years is unusual...
...This time it only served as a barometer to measure the despair of the Liberal leadership...
...By 1985, when the Big Blue Machine finally wore out, the Liberals moved in with a minority government supported-for a legislative price-by the NDP...
...There are fewer lawyers among them...
...He remained cool in the face of the Liberal scare campaign, and avoided any extravagant claims...
...None of this, of course, is expected to materialize overnight...
...Voters, he wrote, "still believe politicians and governments can make a difference in the quality of their lives...
...In practice it cuts much wider, and will be levied on such items as fast food, haircuts, piano lessons, and postage stamps...
...In Nepean, Ontario, in the heart of the Ottawa region, there is a high school named for J.S...
...But it may also have been the instinctive response of a party that had always been in opposition...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 17
