BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Devin Scully, a former local resident who ran in the Ward 3 byelection in 2020 and also sought the Progressive Conservative nomination in Barrie-Innisfil in 2017.
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If you asked a casual observer of Ontario politics six months ago who would win the provincial election, they may have told you that Liberal leader Steven Del Duca was the de facto premier-in-waiting, and that Doug Ford would simply be too unpopular to win re-election.
Ford, of course, is not free of critique over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his approval rating even just last month was an abysmal 37 per cent.
Even Jeff Lehman, Barrie’s mayor who almost always takes the safe road, had the confidence in Del Duca to hitch his cart to the Liberal Party horse and stand as the Liberal candidate in Progressive Conservative stronghold Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte.
Lehman seemingly had such confidence in Del Duca that he went all in, vowing not to seek re-election as mayor if he isn’t elected as MPP.
But a month in politics is an eternity. A recent projection for the upcoming provincial election put out by iPolitics in partnership with Mainstreet Research put Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives back in comfortable majority territory, with Steven Del Duca’s Liberals distantly trailing the PCs and the NDP.
As it stands in the projection, Ford’s PCs will win 76 seats, the same number he won in 2018 against the scandal-ridden and wildly unpopular premier Kathleen Wynne. Del Duca is projected to win nine. There are 14 seats in the projection still listed as unknown, but even taking all the unknown ridings wouldn’t put the Liberals ahead of Andrea Horwath’s NDP to claim Official Opposition status, based on the current projection.
The question Del Duca and the Liberal team will need to answer is what went wrong? Why is their leader not resonating with voters? Del Duca was a minister in the Wynne government, but being a cabinet minister alone doesn’t provide lasting name recognition, and he lost his seat in 2018.
He’s remembered by partisans of all stripe, but partisans alone don’t make or break elections. In the general public, his name is relatively obscure. And thanks to the events of 2020 onward, and his lack of a seat at Queen's Park, he hasn’t had much opportunity to get his name out there again.
When he does make a headline, it hasn’t always been positive. Del Duca and his team of candidates took some heat recently for holding a crowded indoor event without masks, while at the same time calling for a return to mask rules.
The mask debate alone is polarizing, but it becomes much worse when the debate is raised by a hypocrite, as Del Duca appeared to be on the issue. He will also be dogged by the scandals of the Wynne government, as well as his personal gaffes like the swimming pool incident.
Doug Ford was able to win a majority in 2018 largely based on not being the other team, and there’s no doubt that Del Duca and the Liberals were counting on a similar sentiment to sweep them into power this spring, but so far that hope has come up flat.
There is still a long campaign to go, and Steven Del Duca has his work cut out for him if he wants to salvage electoral hope for his party, lest they spend another term trying to find themselves in the political wilderness.
Devin Scully
Halifax, N.S.
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