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COMMENTARY
June 30, 2004
Fear wins
One of the advantages of making wild predictions before elections is that one then gets to study why one was wrong. Much can be learned from the exercise. My own (unpublished) prediction guessed the result almost exactly except with the Conservative and Liberal parties reversed. In other words I expected the Conservatives to win more than 135 seats and the Liberals less than 100. I was right within a couple of seats for the results in every province but my own. I was on the nail riding by riding even in northern Ontario. But for southern Ontario where I live and perhaps have lived too long I got the result backwards and thus the national result backwards. I expected the Conservatives to win over 70 seats in Ontario overall and the Liberals to hang on to less than 30. I then spent much of Monday night examining riding-by-riding results to determine why I was so wrong -- cross-checking against their statistical profiles. And the fact leapt out at me: that southern Ontario has changed electorally beyond recognition over the last decade or so. I had failed to take sufficiently seriously observations that I had myself been making. Until very recently I believe Ontario would indeed have thrown the Liberals out: first because of the massive corruption waste and arrogance that had been exposed; and second because they had tried to mask this with a remarkably hateful smear campaign against the opposition. The first might have cost them half their seats; the second would have cost them most of the rest. Instead today the second helped them recover from the first. Here is the hard truth. The province of Ontario no longer has a small-c conservative hinterland. In riding after riding and especially through the 60-plus ridings of its "golden horseshoe" anchored by Toronto -- since Confederation the heart of English-speaking Canada -- something has happened akin to what happened in the city of Toronto a generation before. Low birthrates outward migration and high immigration from non-traditional sources have utterly transformed the political landscape. Where I had expected Ontario to largely revert to historic voting patterns given a superannuated Liberal government coming to pieces and a Conservative opposition that had come together it did not revert. In riding after riding which Tories used to win even when they were running an iguana the Grits were now romping home by wide margins. Toronto itself was once "Toronto the blue" -- and remained well into the 1960s WASP and mostly Tory not only by inheritance but also by cultural assimilation of fresh immigrant arrivals. The transformation began in the middle of Toronto and worked concentrically outwards. Curiously the Toronto-born Stephen Harper almost perfectly reflects that old Ontario profile (what I call the "Inner Leaside") in his outlook and mannerisms. He is not the kind of person who could possibly frighten anyone who used to live around here. And as recently as 1995 it was still possible for a provincial party as that of Mike Harris to sweep into power surfing the older Ontario demographics of what has been called the "905 belt". No longer. "Main Street" was transformed into "suburbia" without a huge immediate change in values and outlook; but then suddenly urban suburban and semi-urban southern Ontario passed a tipping point into what I call the "Mall Culture". What I mean by this is a kind of deracinated multi-ethnic hodgepodge genuinely lacking core values a common outlook or a proprietary sense about the political order -- and therefore easily responsive to the passing suggestions of media and mass culture. Or to put it another way the sort of people who can be easily herded using the cynical methods the Liberal Party employs; and who as Dalton McGuinty has discovered quickly forgive and forget when politicians tell them huge lies. Alberta by contrast represents today something like what Ontario used to be. It is not the old Ontario that is shocked by Alberta. It is the new Ontario that is so easily shocked; and alienated from its own former nature. Jane Jacobs's recent book Dark Age Coming looks upon what I think the same scene from a more "liberal" and universal standpoint. A coming demographic bulge of baby-boom retirees will radically destabilize a society in which most stabilizing influences are already tottering. Mrs. Jacobs mentions the breakdown of family the decline of higher education the growth of pseudo-science confiscatory taxation the loss of self-regulation in professions and trades. She is describing the rest of the new Ontario. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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