By conventional journalistic standards, it was unusual to hear CBC reporter Keith Boagâe(TM)s initial take on the Ontario election results.

Leading off The National, he explained to viewers that Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty might have expected to be on the defensive or even to lose the election. But, said Boag, âeoehe got away with itâe . The comment was as stunningly accurate as it was unexpected. The bigger question is, how did he get away with it?

For starters, McGuinty had the rare luxury of following the most reviled government in Ontario history. It didnâe(TM)t seem to matter how inspiring his leadership might be (and it was pretty uninspiring), or how many promises he broke (and there were lots), because he could always point to how much worse things would be if those nasty Conservatives were still in power. The Liberalsâe(TM) re-election slogan was âeoeMoving Forward Togetherâe , but it could easily have been, âeoeWe may not have done anything to help you, but at least we didnâe(TM)t do anything to hurt you.âe

Even so, a competent opposition could have beaten McGuinty, or at least reduced him to minority status. While the Conservatives made a smart move in choosing a leader with no public association to the Harris years âe” the eponymous John Tory âe” they managed to squander the dead heat in the polls that they enjoyed going into the election (one poll even had them leading).

If I were giving strategic advice to the Conservatives (and, for some reason, thatâe(TM)s not something that I usually find myself being called on to do), I would have told them to avoid making any major policy proposals of their own and instead run a campaign based on two things:

    âe¢ That the Harris years are in the past and the party has no wish to go down that road again; and

    âe¢ Dalton McGuinty is an ineffective Premier who doesnâe(TM)t keep his promises.

While they tried some of that (in particular, making it clear that Harris-era MPPs who were defeated in 2003 were not welcome as candidates), their message was lost in the controversy over Toryâe(TM)s plan to extend public funding to religious schools.

Itâe(TM)s every political operativeâe(TM)s dream to be able to say that they found the defining issue of an election campaign and then rode that issue to victory. Identifying a defining issue and then having it become responsible for a defeat is a less sought after achievement, but the Tories managed to pull it off in spectacular fashion.

The school funding issue allowed McGuinty to cloak himself as âeoethe defender of public educationâe , a costume that his record hardly entitled him to wear (local school boards are still labouring under the Harris governmentâe(TM)s funding formula, and the best that McGuinty could promise was to âeoereviewâe it by 2010). The issue also overtook discussion virtually every other issue âe” which seemed to suit McGuinty just fine.

The New Democrats, led by Howard Hampton, were less pleased with the single-issue dominance. They had decided to campaign on only six issues, and this wasnâe(TM)t one of them (although quite a number of party activists were lobbying to take school funding in the opposite direction, with an end to long-established funding for Catholic schools and the creation of a single secular school system).

Hampton appeared to be standing on the sidelines for much of the campaign, pleading with the media to deal with the real issues. It was only when he went beyond pleading and actually yelled at the media that his message finally began to get some traction. By then, it was already too late, particularly since the collapse of the Tory vote strengthened the Liberals in areas where the NDP was hoping to make gains at their expense. Despite an increase in the popular vote, some stellar candidates (forty per cent of whom were women) and conditions that had appeared to predict an increase in seats, the NDP was left with the same number of seats that it had going into the election.

When the ballots were counted, the other victim on the night was the cause of electoral reform. McGuinty had belatedly and half-heartedly created a process to study reform, but set up rules for public education and referendum campaigning that were so restrictive that most people didnâe(TM)t even know the referendum was happening, much less understand the proposed Mixed Member Proportional system (which allowed opponents to fill the void with all kinds of misinformation).

In the end, the proposal to adopt MMP for future elections didnâe(TM)t even get a simple majority, let alone the sixty per cent âeoesuper-majorityâe that it required. Ironically, the election results (which handed McGuinty two-thirds of the seats with less than half the popular vote) helped to prove the case for the electoral reform thatâe(TM)s not going to happen.

Both the election results and the referendum defeat would suggest that Ontario is happy with the status quo. But, surely, we can do better than that. Please?

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...