Columnists
Pie in the Sky?
It didn’t take long for Andrea Horvath and Steven Del Duca to read the writing on the wall. Both announced their resignations on election night. After four chances, Ms. Horvath’s NDP had not been able to convince Ontarians that it could form a government and ended up with fewer seats than it had going into the election. Mr. Del Duca couldn’t win his own riding, and his Liberal party gained only one additional seat—not enough to regain official party standing.
And it also didn’t take long for voices to be heard calling for a merger of the Liberals with the NDP. Among the first up was our own Greg Sorbara —a Liberal who served as Kathleen Wynne’s finance minister. He is quoted in the Globe and Mail as follows: “It’s pie in the sky. But also it’s an idea at least worthy of some consideration.”
From a numbers perspective, the merger makes sense. The Conservatives won 84 seats; the NDP 31, and the Liberals eight. Sounds like an unassailable majority, right? But if you assume that the 2022 votes for the NDP and Liberals were votes combined behind a single candidate in each riding, the combination would add, by my calculations, 34 seats to the 39 already won, for a total of 73 seats. All of a sudden, your combined forces would hold a majority. The Conservatives would drop down to about 47 seats in which their vote totals exceeded the combined NDP and Liberal votes. Perhaps in that case it would be Doug Ford who was sent packing.
The Conservatives won 41 per cent of the popular vote, which gave them 67 per cent of the seats. The NDP won 24 per cent of the popular vote, which resulted in 25 per cent of the seats. The Liberals won an identical share of the popular vote, but it translated into only seven per cent of the seats.
No wonder Doug Ford is keen to preserve the ‘first past the post’ voting system: it benefits the party with the plurality.
To play with the numbers a little more, the total turnout at the polls was 43.5 per cent. That means that 56.5 per cent of Ontarians didn’t vote and presumably don’t particularly care to have a say in who governs them. Presumably, they also wouldn’t care whether or not there was a merger between the NDP and the Liberals. (And presumably, they further wouldn’t care if there was another merger between the NDP/Liberals and the Conservative party, so that one party governed the province and all of the tough decisions were made behind party doors. The individual vote would have symbolic value only).
If all those 56.5 per cent non-voting people had voted for the New Blue party or the Ontario party, one of those two would be running Ontario right now. And if the NDP and the Liberals had run more effective campaigns, there were enough harvestable votes out there to swing the election in their favour —without having to merge.
There are logistical complications to a merger. The Liberals have the weaker hand. All sitting MPPs would presumably be grandfathered, giving the NDP contribution to the partnership a solid tilt. The other ridings would presumably be the subject of internal contests, with the winner being the sole official party candidate. The time for the Liberals to negotiate a merger is after they have bounced back.
In philosophy, there is a significant difference between the two parties, which may make negotiation of a merger difficult. The Liberals would tax the Rosedale rich to the point at which they grumbled but went along with the measure as the price of maintaining their privileges. The NDP wouldn’t care about how much they upset the Rosedale rich: they would happily redistribute income to the less well off.
But governing isn’t just a matter of acting on your philosophy. Events have a way of demanding your attention and requiring you to act in a way that may run counter to it. Just ask Doug Ford as he was faced with the Covid crisis. He had to spend money like a Liberal—which had the incidental benefit of getting him re-elected.
All in all, pie in the sky though it may be, the merger is worth a serious look. And if a full-scale merger is not to be, some sort of co-operation agreement whereby the parties agree to run a single candidate in each riding may still be in the cards.
Comments (0)