News & Analysis

Ontario’s provincial election on October 6 produced an outcome that few pundits predicted in the months leading up to the election. Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives went into it with a double-digit lead over a wildly unpopular Premier Dalton McGuinty. Just a few months ago, most political commentators thought this would be a cake walk for the PCs.

After all, Dalton McGuinty had repeatedly lied to voters by increasing their taxes (after vowing he wouldn’t). He snuck in hidden taxes like the “health premium” and “eco tax”. McGuinty doubled the province’s debt, putting Ontario on the path to going broke. The unemployment rate climbed under his watch. He outraged parents in April 2010 with a radical Sex Ed curriculum that would’ve taught young children to question whether they were boys or girls. He bullied Catholic schools to accept openly homosexual student clubs, even though it goes against Catholic teaching.

So how on earth did McGuinty win a strong minority, picking up 53 out of 107 seats, while Hudak’s PCs only earned 37 seats in the legislature? Did Ontarians suddenly, in late September, realize that they were actually in love with Dalton McGuinty? Not likely.

There are several factors that explain why Hudak’s tories couldn’t topple this disastrous, unpopular premier. However, we’ll explain one major factor that the mainstream, left-wing media won’t talk about, and it's all about suppressed voter turnout amongst social conservatives.

Election night results show that voter turnout fell to a dismal 47.6% in the Ontario provincial election, down from 52.1% in 2007. We believe that many of the 380,000 eligible voters who did not bother voting were “moral conservatives”, who felt that no mainline party leader represented their values during this election campaign.

Hudak’s PC strategists blew it, by failing to connect with a natural constituency of any small-c conservative movement, that being, pro-life and pro-family voters. When Hudak took some wrong-headed advice and failed to respond to the abortion question, he lost pro-lifers and people of faith. PC strategists forgot that the ‘small-c conservative base’ consists of both fiscal and social conservatives, and even some disaffected Liberals. To have improved their fortunes, the PCs needed to reach out with some kind of platform that appealed to this constituency. Instead, Hudak appeared to be fiscally and socially liberal, a McGuinty-lite if you will, thus keeping a significant portion of that natural base at home on election day.

Hudak’s PCs did make one move that appealed to social conservatives. That was attacking McGuinty’s radical Sex Ed curriculum (see PC flyer). However, this came out only a few days before the end of the campaign, providing too little time to turn around his fortunes. It is notable that the race began to tighten up in the final days, and that could be attributed to this last minute stand to protect parents from the Liberals’ Sex Ed agenda. But unfortunately for the PCs, that was Too Little, Too Late. In addition, Hudak was perceived as not taking that issue on aggressively enough. He should have pushed this much harder and much earlier in the campaign. He might be Premier today had he done so.

This year’s abysmal turnout actually follows a record low in 2007 of 52.1%, down from 56.9% in 2003. That means that over the past eight years, approximately 790,000 eligible voters chose to stay home rather than vote. We maintain that this represents a steady turning away of largely, social conservative voters by the Ontario PCs. Unfortunately, some Progressive Conservative strategists labour under the false impression that moral conservatives have no choice but to vote PC. They do have another choice – stay home and watch hockey instead.

While it is true that social conservatives and Christians had the choice to place their vote with the Family Coalition Party who ran several candidates, our experience is that, unfortunately, many pro-lifers and people of faith choose not to do so because they see change being possible only through a mainline party. Unfortunately, they feel there’s no realistic possibility of a “fringe” party being able to win, and view it as a “wasted” effort. For as long as this continues to be the case in Ontario, the so-called “conservative movement” will need to attract these disaffected “moral conservatives” if it hopes to succeed.

Our thesis is reinforced by examining the performance of Stephen Harper’s Federal Conservatives in the 2011 election. Although Harper himself is not pro-life, he and other MPs within his party managed to take actions that pleased the typical “values voter” or “social conservative”. The result was an increase in voter turnout, from 58.8% to 61.1%. A few examples of the “red meat” that federal Conservatives gave to bolster support from moral conservatives and Christians:
1. When the Liberal Party put forward a motion to include funding overseas abortions within Canada’s Maternal & Child Health Initiative at the G8, Conservative MPs voted unanimously against the motion - and defeated it.
2. Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge put forward, and received a vote, on a pro-life private members bill to protect women against abortion coercion.
3. Conservative MPs voted almost unanimously against the transgender “Bathroom Bill”, C-389.
In addition, Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney had been visiting ethnic/immigrant communities the past few years with the distinct message, “The Conservative Party of Canada shares your family values. Therefore, you should vote your values and vote Conservative”.

Even though CLC feels these actions were not nearly sufficient, we believe all the above elements indeed helped the federal Conservatives to draw in many social conservatives and people of faith… and set them apart from the Liberals who, under Michael Ignatieff appeared radical and out of touch with mainstream values. This is borne out by studies which show that Catholics as a block, are switching allegiance from the federal Liberal party, to the Conservatives*. Tim Hudak’s Ontario PCs did not differentiate themselves from the Liberals and NDP in the same way as their federal counterparts, hence the failure to draw in small-c moral conservatives, and thus the party’s failure to defeat McGuinty October 6th.

* Note: CLC urges its supporters not to vote based on party. We encourage people to vote based on the merits of individual candidates, not the party nor party leader.