NDP Poised To Make History In Newfoundland And Labrador

The New Democrats are looking to make a splash in Atlantic Canada following their stunning success in May's federal election, and in at least one province they might just pull it off.

But the effects of the orange wave and the outpouring of sympathy in the wake Jack Layton's death has been a little uneven.

In Newfoundland and Labrador’s upcoming October vote, the NDP under Lorraine Michael is poised to make history. The New Democrats have never won more than two seats in any provincial election on the Rock, and their vote share has only been in the double-digits once, in 1985.

The timing of the provincial election is good for the NDP leader. In May's federal election, the party took almost one-third of the vote and easily won the two ridings in St. John's. Jack Harris, former Newfoundland and Labrador NDP leader, took his seat with 71 per cent of the vote, while Ryan Cleary was elected with 48 per cent. Outside of the city, however, the NDP was not much of a factor.

Tories, New Democrats banned from Liberal events

All’s fair in love, war and an Ontario election campaign.

Breaking with a tradition of professional courtesy on the hustings that stretches back decades, the governing Liberals have banned Progressive Conservative and New Democratic MPPs, candidates and staffers from all electoral events featuring Dalton McGuinty.

“The Ontario Liberal campaign will strike a very serious tone and we’re only interested in presenting our positive plan to Ontarians,” Chris Morley, McGuinty’s chief of staff, told the Star on Sunday.

Concerned that opposition politicians or aides “would play political games” at the Liberal leader’s events, Morley last week called senior officials with Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath to advise them they were not welcome to attend.

Hudak plunges into dangerous liaison with Rob Ford

Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives are taking a massive gamble and embracing Mayor Rob Ford, not out of love — the two aren’t close — but because they have no choice.

The risks are huge. Ford’s popularity is sinking, according to polling data, as his hunt for “gravy” falters and his administration wobbles. Just as the provincial campaign takes off, Ford is wading into budget deliberations seemingly eager to inflict deep spending cuts despite a promise not to.

Nobody was more eager than the ruling Liberals — fearful, not long ago, of the Ford factor in the Oct. 6 provincial election — to see Ford and Hudak together at Friday evening’s “Ford Fest” barbecue.

Hudak told reporters after the more than hour-long meeting in Ford’s mother’s sprawling bungalow they talked about the mayor’s efforts to clean up the financial “mess” left by his predecessor, David Miller.

Tim Hudak’s criminal past

Ontario Conservative candidate Tim Hudak thinks pot smokers are criminals and wants to see them punished. He's also admitted to smoking pot. Which means…

This week, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak was unveiling his proposal to create an absolutely useless grow-op registry when he was asked if he’d ever smoked dope. Of course he has, and he said so. That became the news.

Almost right away, the people I follow on Twitter and whatnot were all like, “why does anyone still care if a politician has smoked a bit of pot. Haven’t we all? Yawn.”

The answer to why we should still care is in Maclean’s this week, in a story about our spending on crime and our crime rates (that’s not yet online):

Cannabis arrests jumped 13 per cent in 2010 to 75,126. Of those, almost 57,000 were for simple possession, a 14 per cent jump from the year before. (The statistics reflect cases where the arrest was the most serious charge a person faced, not the thousands more where a pot charge was tacked onto a string of more serious crimes.)

Prepare for post-election pain, no matter who wins Ontario vote

No matter who wins on voting day, brace yourself for the morning after — Ontario’s day of financial reckoning.

Forget all the campaign rhetoric from politicians pledging to bring the province’s finances under control without inflicting pain. They all know better, and so should you.

As you read this, a complete rethink of government services is being carried out by a little-known fiscal commission labouring in the shadows. Pain is probably unavoidable, regardless of who wins power on Oct. 6.

The commission is no stealth mission, but it is flying under the radar. Its mandate, embedded in the last budget, is to seek out government waste and identify services for privatization.

Elections And The Premiers: Why Dalton McGuinty Is Worse Off Now Than Four Years Ago

Ontario and Manitoba are setting up for some closely contested elections in October.

But the last elections in the two provinces in 2007 were also supposed to go down to the wire, and in the end the incumbent governments beat their rivals by 10 points. Will the same thing happen in the fall?

Four months prior to the October 2007 election in Ontario, two polls by Ipsos-Reid and Environics indicated a neck-and-neck race between the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives, with about 40 per cent of Ontarians intending to vote for the governing Liberals and about 38 per cent expecting to vote for John Tory’s PCs.

But on election night, the Liberals bumped up their support to 42 per cent while that of the Progressive Conservatives tanked to only 32 per cent. Part of that swing was attributed to Tory’s disastrous campaign pledge to extend public funding to faith-based schools, a promise he had to back away from amid widespread opposition.

This election may be different. In order for Dalton McGuinty to win his third election, he will need an even more dramatic shift in support during the campaign.

The last polls by Forum Research and Ipsos-Reid put the PCs in the lead with about 41 per cent, well ahead of the Liberals at 30 per cent and the NDP at 21 per cent. If the same kind of change in voting intentions occurs over the summer as it did in 2007, the Liberals will have an outside chance of pulling off a victory.

The situation in Manitoba, however, is far rosier for the incumbent. In March 2007, two months before the May election, the PCs and the governing New Democrats were tied at 40 per cent apiece in a Probe Research poll. But during the campaign, the NDP roared ahead to finish with 48 per cent support, outpacing the Progressive Conservatives by 10 points.

The most recent poll paints a similar picture: the NDP and PCs are tied at 44 per cent, with the Liberals at only nine per cent. Premier Greg Selinger is in the same position that his predecessor, Gary Doer, was four years ago. If the cards fall this year as they did then, Selinger should be able to win his first election as NDP leader.

Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador are also having elections in the fall, but their outcomes are not in doubt.

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

Ontario's battle of the number-crunchers

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak’s promises to cut taxes, spend more on health care and education and erase the province’s multibillion-dollar deficit in six years do not stand up to scrutiny, say the governing Liberals in their most aggressive attack yet on his campaign platform.

With the provincial election in 18 weeks and Mr. Hudak leading in the polls, the Liberals are attempting to cast doubt on the credibility of the Tories’ promises. Their orchestrated attack on Wednesday set off a flurry of competing spin on the numbers contained in the Tory platform, known as “changebook,” and ended up raising questions about the number-crunching abilities of both sides.

The day began with senior officials in Premier Dalton McGuinty’s office holding a briefing for reporters, where they presented a 12-page document outlining an enormous gap between what the Tories say their promises will cost and the actual tab. According to the Liberals’ calculations, the Tories need to find $14-billion in unidentified savings over four years to make their promises mesh.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan denounced changebook as a “crock” and called on the Tories to “come clean” on how they plan to fill an enormous hole in their numbers.
“This is just chock full of holes,” he told reporters. “It’s dishonest.”

As it turns out, the hole isn’t quite as deep as the Liberals claim – a fact that became clear only after senior Tory officials held their own briefing with members of the Queen’s Park press gallery, where they presented an entirely different take on the numbers. This was followed by senior Liberals wandering the corridors in the provincial legislature, doing one-on-one impromptu interviews with reporters, many of whom were feeling a little dazed by that point.

Full Article
Source: Globe & Mail 

The mathematically challenged Tim Hudak

Tim Hudak is not the first politician to take voters for chumps, and he certainly won't be the last. But the Ontario Conservative Leader's platform, on which he'll fight the fall election, is based on so many dubious, to say nothing of false, premises that he must be counting on the electorate's ignorance for victory.

Like many politicians before him, Mr. Hudak refuses to face facts – or, rather, refuses to tell voters anything remotely resembling the truth. And the truth is that, whichever party wins the election, the provincial budget will have to be cut severely. It's a truth the governing Liberals also prefer to avoid.

Mr. Hudak, who visits Ottawa on Thursday, promises to spend more on health and education, which together take about three-quarters of all government program spending. He can do nothing about rising payments on the debt. So he's left with the threadbare promise to cut spending on what remains by 2 per cent yearly, saying this can be done by not filling public-sector vacancies as they arise.

This is bad math, cleverly disguised. Even if possible – and the reductions aren't possible without cutting or scaling back whole programs – the reductions would be smaller than Mr. Hudak would need to balance a budget to whose deficit he'll add by a series of tax cuts and new spending commitments.

Full Article
Source: Globe & Mail