Howard Hampton

Ontario Election Throw-Back: Monday September 10, 2007

Monday September 10, 2007By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Monday September 10, 2007

Ontario’s election campaign now underway

They’ve been running all summer. Now comes the 30-day sprint to the finish.

The campaign for the Oct. 10 Ontario election gets underway Monday when Premier Dalton McGuinty visits the lieutenant-governor to formally drop the writ and dissolve the Ontario legislature.

The vote is expected to be a referendum of sorts on McGuinty and the Liberals, with their healthy majority – won in 2003 atop cresting public dissatisfaction with Conservative spending cuts – hanging in the balance.

Chipping away at an apparent Liberal lead are the reborn Progressive Conservatives, who are embracing the “progressive” part of their moniker in an effort to distance themselves from the slash-and-burn days of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves.

The issues and tone expected to shape the campaign were in full evidence Sunday, as Conservative Leader John Tory trashed what he called McGuinty’s record of broken promises and the Liberal leader took aim at a Tory proposal to fund faith-based schools.

The Conservative and Liberal platforms are similar in many ways, with both promising more money for health care and education.

The New Democrats have yet to unveil their platform, but Leader Howard Hampton has made several campaign pledges of his own in recent weeks.

More: Two decades of Ontario Elections

Election Throw-Back: September 3, 2003

Wednesday September 3, 2003By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 3, 2003

Eves Calls the Election

Premier Ernie Eves is hoping that Ontarians will give him an election mandate on Oct. 2 but is facing an uphill battle against the Liberal Party after two controversial terms of Progressive Conservative government.

Mr. Eves, who served six years as deputy premier and finance minister under former Tory leader Mike Harris, was selected by the party in the early spring of 2002 but held off on calling an election until Tuesday.

The most recent poll for The Globe and Mail by Ipsos-Reid showed it will be an uphill struggle for Mr. Eves against the Liberals and their leader, Dalton McGuinty. Sixty per cent of those polled last month said they thought it was time for a change.

In a speech launching his campaign, Mr. McGuinty acknowledged that he has “been waiting for this for a long time,” adding: “I have never felt more confident, more experienced, more determined, more ready to get on with this.”

Mr. Eves alluded to his electoral difficulties by spicing his campaign announcement with a host of attacks on Mr. McGuinty.

More: Two decades of Ontario Elections

Election throw-back – May 1999

The Ontario Leaders 1999Illustration by Graeme MacKay, published in the Hamilton Spectator in May, 1999

Leading up to the 1999 provincial election, Premier Mike Harris was defending a Conservative majority government which had ushered in a series of reforms known as the Common Sense Revolution. Battling him were two new and untested opposition leaders, Dalton McGuinty and Howard Hampton. The results gave the Tories a reduced seat majority.

More: Two decades of Ontario Elections

 

October 11, 2007 – Ontario Election Wrap up

And now a little cartoon round-up of the 2007 Provincial election. My apologies if you can’t stand reading around hypertext.

I think McGuinty had this election in bag even before the campaign started. In my books the Green Party dropped several notches back into wingnut territory when their own holiday pledge… but anyway…

The people of Ontario have decided (by hypnosis?), or at least half of the province’s eligible voters did, and it’ll be 4 more years of Liberal government, with Dalton McGuinty at the helm.

Voters also decided to nix the electoral reform referendum question Mixed Member Proportional either out of ignorance, or confusion, or just because it plain wasn’t palatable.

I can’t say that I’m happy or sad over the reality… perhaps blase is the best word to describe how I feel over the election results. In terms of cartooning, the next four years of Dalton McGuinty should be as bountiful as the last four. In my mind the vote was not an endorsement of the McGuinty Liberals but a rejection of John Tory’s lame brain idea to introduce public funding for religious schools when there was no popular demand for such a thing in the first place. It only hijacked the campaign and overshadowed many more issues that deserved better discussion. Much damage could have been inflicted on the McGuinty Liberals by the PC’s by reminding voters of all the broken promises and dubious issuing of government grants from a secret slush fund. Hardly anything was brought up during the campaign regarding the ongoing mess between the Province and natives over the standoff at Caledonia. Even Howie Hampton’s attempt to remind voters of the $22,000 payraise didn’t stick to the Liberals.

Despite trying to appeal to voters as a renewed moderate party faith based funding of schools did the PC’s in. John Tory’s back tracking on the issue a week ago only made a mockery of the PC’s official election slogan for the campaign, “Leadership Matters“. By this past Thankgiving weekend, it was pretty clear that John Tory had become the turkey about to be carved. I think John Tory is a very smart man. He is a man of a lot of political backroom experience having served as a mandarin for Bill Davis and Brian Mulroney. He’s got great crudentials in law, business, and charitable organizations. On one hand he has what it takes to be a great premier, on the other he has a disasterous track record of defeat, such as losing this election, losing the Toronto Mayoral election against David Miller, and heading the horrible campaign of the federal PC’s in 1993 which resulted in a near wipe out of seats in the House of Commons. You’d think he’d learn by now but even in defeat the guy just doesn’t know when to quit:

Thursday June 3, 1999

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 3, 1999

Hold Your Nose if You Must – But Go Vote

Why bother? It has been a campaign of soundbites. Weeks of doubletalk, namecalling, diversion and trivia. Instead of rising above the din of negative rhetoric, the party leaders more often seemed to be competing in a game of How Low Can You Go. Candidates of all stripes, locally and provincially, were scarcely better as they ducked all candidate meetings in favour of shallow photo opportunities. Thanks to bad organization, voters today can expect lineups and delays. We’ve been lied to, and treated like fools. Who can blame frustrated, weary voters for wondering: Why bother?

Of course, the answer is: We have to. It matters. Avoiding the polling station isn’t an option. Much as we feel assaulted and corrupted by opportunistic and cynical politicians, by too many glib pollsters, by media pitchmen and special interests, one unalterable truth remains: Voting is probably the most important thing we’ll do today.

Consider the words of John Kenneth Galbraith: “When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against themselves. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.” The act of casting our ballot is the best way we have of taking back the democratic process; of seizing it from the spin doctors and power brokers more attuned to ideology and self-interest than to public service.

“Who will govern the governors?” Thomas Jefferson asked, then answered: “There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.” By voting today, we invoke a contract with the people we elect. We empower them to represent us fairly and constructively. By not voting, we defer and opt out of our collective responsibility. Some, thoroughly disenchanted and disenfranchised by the political process, will argue not voting is a form of political action unto itself. But it’s not. It is nothing. Declining the ballot, as proposed by an author on today’s Forum page, may be marginally better in that it requires concrete action and expresses, to a point, the “none of the above” philosophy many have adopted. But in our view, declining the ballot still amounts to opting out. The stakes are too high for that.

This is our chance to express ourselves on the record of the incumbents. We can endorse or renounce on any basis we choose. We can base our decision on the relative adequacy of a local MPP, or we can hold our nose and vote for the least objectionable alternative. If nothing else, we can consider our ballot the permit that justifies and validates future complaints and criticism of the party in government.

H.G. Wells describes the election as “Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its great function …” Diminished and reduced as this campaign has been, that characterization still holds true. And if all else fails, and you just can’t summon a positive reason for that trek to the polling station, a constructive negative will do. Consider the words of American critic and pundit George Jean Nathan, who years ago wrote: “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” Amen to that. (Source: Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

 

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