Last week I found myself in a rather dreary, miserable Toronto.  Lashed by rain, and wind, and snow, the city seemed to have been beaten down by this year's endless winter.

That still didn't quite prepare me for the apathy I found.  It seems everyone I talked to had resigned themselves to Doug Ford becoming premier.

From the outside, this seems pretty straightforward.  His poll numbers are as high or higher than the Progressive Conservative numbers were before the Patrick Brown saga began.  But I kind of expected people to be more opposed to the idea than they were.

This is very bad news for the Liberals.  The folks I was hanging out with aren't the type to go around saying, well, "folks" in that Fordian way.  Nor was I hanging out with a bunch of lefty media types.  But they were what I would peg as, generally, amenable to Liberal rule.  And the fact that these sorts of people aren't getting too worked up about a Grit drubbing gave me a good sense of the deep hole the Liberals are in.

When people actively don't care that your government is going down, you're in a very bad spot.  It's something of a cliché to talk about how keeping your opponents' voters at home is one of the most effective ways to win an election.  But there's a good amount of truth in it.  Usually, the game plan is to put out a bunch of mean and nasty ads and opposition research denigrating your opponent and the democratic process generally.

If your opponent is the one depressing their own vote, however, that makes the whole proposition much easier.

And, my goodness, is there plenty here to depress the Liberal vote.  Take Wednesday, when former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty's chief of staff, David Livingston, was sentenced to spend a few months in jail for his participation in destroying documents during the gas plants scandal.

It makes for a nice juxtaposition set next to the Liberal budget of a fortnight ago, where Finance Minister Charles Sousa sold a new round of deficits — a naked bid for votes in the form of a spending splurge — as a responsible choice by a responsible government.  Which is fun, considering a bunch of emails were illegally destroyed to hide the government's responsibility in cancelling a pair of natural gas power plants costing the province in the neighbourhood of a billion dollars during a previous election.

And that's just the latest blow to the absurdly unpopular government.

So, during my trip things were to the point where friends said they would vote Green rather than cast a vote for Ford, Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, or even Andrea Horwath*.  Having done this myself, the psychology behind it isn't really because you think the Green party has the best policies or would make a good government, but that the other options are so unpalatable it's the only thing you can do and still feel like you've done your civic duty.

Now, I can hear some of you perhaps crowing that campaigns matter.  And that's true, campaigns very much matter.  Especially when an Ontario Progressive Conservative is campaigning, as things have a tendency to rocket** straight off the rails.

This is why you'll see things like the Ford campaign ditching the traditional media bus.  Now, I happen to think the media bus is more than a bit shit.  It leads to a certain lazy narrowness to the press pack's coverage.  So this may lead to coverage more useful — and, god willing, interesting — than the usual campaign dreck. But it does also have the effect of keeping a bit of space and distance between the candidate and the media.  This is good if you're trying to keep someone prone to saying and doing extremely dumb things from doing those things in front of a pack of cameras.

It also has the added benefit of playing along nicely with Ford's continual harping against "the media."  It's not exactly hypocritical to trash journalists whenever possible, then tell them to find their own ride for the campaign.  At that point, limiting his exposure to blunder is just gravy.

Wynne has a steep hill to climb if she's to hang onto power in Ontario.  If the threat of a guy like Ford isn't enough to sway the friends of a mushy media liberal like me, what will?

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*The reasons for not wanting to vote Horwath were quite varied and I don't have the space to explore here in detail.  But I will say none of them involved the spectre of Bob Rae.  For the most part, people of my generation remember Rae fondly, if at all, for the extra days off in elementary school.

**This is very tangental, but it's amusing to me the Toronto subway is nicknamed "The Rocket" by the TTC, and has every car plastered with decals saying it was voted the best transit system in North America for 2017 by the American Public Transportation Association.  As though a decal makes up for the obvious mess the rest of the country knows it to be.  I mean, a one-stop subway for how many billion?  lol.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics