Mrs. Dalwhinnie voted separately from me yesterday. Later, she shook her finger at me and swore me to absolute secrecy. Then she allowed as how she had voted Conservative in the Ontario elections.
Given the results of the election, I suspect there have been many many such conversations across Ontario yesterday, as long time Liberals, the indifferent, and the usually non-voting joined the committed Conservatives to crush the Ontario Liberals.
There are several reasons for this defeat. The most significant is the most obvious: after 15 years in power, every party needs to be purged. But in addition the Ontario Liberals were moving the province in the direction of Venezuela. Oh I grant you it would have taken another fifty years to ruin the place, but intentions count.
Green energy, spending lavishly, ramping up the debt to absurd levels, green energy, hugely expensive electrical power as a result of subsidizing green energy: you know the drill by now.
It all starts in the excesses of compassion and caring. Let these two forces run without any countering forces for 15 years and you have Ontario. People are being ‘left behind’, and government exists to do something about the left-behinds. So we raise the minimum wage because it is the “right thing to do”. Consequently people whose productivity does not reach $14 an hour are let go, or cannot find work. Compassion, doing the right thing, without any reckoning of practical consequences: that is the Ontario Liberal way.
Also, the planet is being ravaged by the menace of global warming. So green clean energy policies drive us off steady reliable low cost fossil fuels to forms of energy that blight the countryside and provide rents to friends of the regime who put up the windmills and charge the taxpayer/ratepayer for grossly inefficiently produced electricity. Double bonus for the Ontario Liberals: you get to posture as greenies and yet provide high-priced contracts to friends of the regime. That you impoverish your province is beyond the point. 75,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost as industry migrates out of the province to Great Lakes states and even [gasp!] Quebec.
When the basic facts of the situation are examined, it is surprising that the Liberals lasted as long as they did. The explanation lies in the long time it takes for the electorate to draw the right inferences from political crap they don’t read in the papers to their electricity bills to the appropriate conclusions that their government is not working for their interests. In Ontario it took at last a decade.
When I hear a politician talking of compassion and caring, I look for my wallet. I know my money is about to be taken and misspent.