What’s a conservative gotta do to be chased from office around here?
Call an unnecessary snap election in the dead of winter under completely bogus circumstances, and then run a photo-op generated peek-a-boo campaign in the hopes of shielding the party leader and his roster of candidates from close scrutiny and tough questions?
Nope.
Grind the bones of public services to dust over your six+ years in office including healthcare, emergency rooms closed down, wait times spiked, people lining up for hours in the hopes of securing a family doctor?
Ladies and gentlemen,
allow me to introduce you to PC incumbent Lisa Thomspon who won a fifth term in office on Thursday.
Stink to high heaven with a heavy whiff of corruption, desperately looking to outrun an RCMP investigation?
Hey, hey, hey!
Isn’t that disgraced former Housing Minister Steve Clark cakewalking to another re-election victory?
Now.
To be fair.
Doug Ford did not get handed the big mandate he was looking for, those heady early days of February, when party strategists were excitedly chattering about the possibility of maybe, just maybe, fingers crossed, a 100 seat sort of landslide, all just wishful thinking.
No.
Basically the situation at Queen’s Park is pretty much the same as it was January 29th when Ford pulled the plug. More or less. 80 seats for the government. The NDP still the official opposition. Liberals now with official party status. The Green Party with a couple seats.
Nearly $200 million dollars later, another pile of cash Doug Ford’s lit on fire, and we’re back essentially where we started. Although, instead of just under 18 months before he has to face the electorate again, the premier has got another 4 years to continue undoing the shit he’s been undoing, four more years of shady deals to be made, four more years of misgovernance. Unless, of course, he senses another opportunity to go early and chase that dream of a bigger mandate.
It’s enough to make one throw up their hands, disillusioned, and join the 55% or so of eligible Ontario voters who sat this election out. Politics! [spit] Politicians, eh? The lot of ‘em. [spit] Why bother? [spit]
How can 56% of those eligible voters polled say that they believed the province was heading in the wrong direction and still manage to re-elect the government responsible for such a grim outlook?
Much of the responsibility should be placed at the feet of the opposition parties. How none of them were able to make political hay of the disgruntlement in play, where nearly 60% of voters polled believed that the premier called the election out of pure self-interest, will be the subject of many a postmortems. (A good one here from John McGrath over at TVO.) There might even be room for some critical self-reflection among the respective party brass and braintrusts, presently celebrating over crumbs of good news and little slivers of daylight. We didn’t lose as badly as we might’ve! We’re number 2! We’re number 3! We’re number 4!
For now, for me, I don’t want to let the voters of Ontario off the hook, though.
We’re all adults here, after all. That’s one of the definitions used to determine voting eligibility. Adulthood. Responsible for our own actions. Possessing some degree of agency. No one should have to lead us by our respective noses to the voting booth. In a free and open democracy, it just should be something we reflexively do. On our own initiative.
As I wrote in a post last week, I do understand that there are people who make the very deliberate choice not to vote. They have concluded that, regardless of marking an X on a ballot, their lives will not be impacted in any sort of meaningful way. They’re all the same. Voting does not change that.
Have at it, I say.
At least you took the time to think the matter through and come to a reasoned decision.
I cannot argue with that.
This is for those, however, who just find the whole process too much bother. Figuring out where to vote. When to vote. Working through busy lives and busy schedules.
Who has the time and energy, amirite?
Voting is the very, very least members of a democratic society can do. The very least. The minorest of inconveniences. There’s a whole lot more all of us could be, should be doing in order to keep our democracy vibrant. Casting a ballot is the most basic of baselines.
The past two provincial general elections have seen the lowest voter turnout percentages in Ontario history, two of only three in all that time to fall below the 50% mark, if my shabby research is to be believed. 
That’s through a couple world wars, the Great Depression, 40+ years of inevitability of the Big Blue Machine. If 2022, as we were emerging from Covid, could be seen as an asterisked fluke of historical contingency, how should we view last Thursday? The beginning of a trend?
If the majority of us can’t muster the enthusiasm for even the barest of democratic minimums, what happens when the demands get more onerous, when attacks on its very foundations become impossible to ignore? As we sit here witnessing with our unstable neighbour to the south. Our civic obligations grown flabby, will we be in any condition to fend off those who are determined to deprive us of them? Non-engagement may feel like an option when you take democracy for granted, believing that it will always be there. Why wouldn’t it? It always has been during our lifetime. But threatened from both outside and from within—and you better believe the ‘soft’ suppression of electoral enthusiasm we just experienced here in Ontario counts as an inside job—will we be in any shape to defend the democratic principles that were fought for and died over not that long ago?
If we can’t even be bothered to vote, the willingness to actually have to fight for that right in the future seems questionable.