Having been a part of many a PC Party of Ontario campaigns where everyone involved (myself included) had their partisanship ratcheted up to such a fever pitch that they could not for the life of them see that they were way, way offside with Ontarians, I feel a bit of empathy for the Ontario Liberals, who struggle to explain how Ford remains first in poll after poll.

Whether it's Liberal journalist turned Liberal mouthpiece, Ashley Csanady, literally shaking with rage after Ford blatantly mansplained to Kathleen Wynne at Tuesday's debate, or longtime Liberal hacktivist Scott Reid performing the equivalent of an end-zone celebration on Twitter when Ford dropped Tanya Granic Allen only to find it was all for naught, or the folks at Canadaland who could barely contain their outrage when it was revealed that Doug Ford is engaging in campaign theatrics, as if they have never seen the Liberals do the same, it's all wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth from the leftward side of the aisle.

Part of this is because they really are that naïve and believe that winning this election is simply a matter of educating the good people of the province about Doug Ford's nasty tendencies, and part of this is because, in the very likely event of Premier Ford, they want to be able to tell themselves and their friends that they did the best they could in the face of an overwhelming broflakey whitelash that was funded by the NRA, the Mercer family, Russia, and whatever other post-hoc scapegoating they end up putting out.  For them, the course from here to June 7 is clear, and as usual, nothing I say is going to change it.

But let me offer to those who don't find the prospect of more conspiracy theorizing attractive a simpler and likely much more correct explanation for Teflon Doug.  Basically: The case against Doug is inextricable from the case for Wynne, and vice versa.

Let's derive this framework from first principles.  It is clear that the two major parties are governed by two utterly polarizing leaders.  As such, the tried and true Canadian political strategy of "Define your opponent before he or she has a chance to define him or herself" doesn't apply.

Tim Hudak, John Tory, and Patrick Brown were easy to define because they were presented, intentionally, to the public as nullities, devoid of any blood or colour, because the PCs were terrified of being labelled as right-wing nutbars.  The Liberals knew this was nonsense, and they proceeded to show it to be nonsense in all three cases to great effect.

Doug Ford is already defined.  He's well known.  No amount of howling about how bigoted or blustery he is will tell anybody anything that they didn't already know.  So why the Liberals insist on trying to show Ontarians "the real Doug Ford" is beyond me, especially when they are themselves working to re-elect Kathleen Wynne, a well-defined, well established politician who Ontarians have, by and large, made their minds up about already.

If you hate Ford, you will be very, very motivated to vote for the person who has the best chance of beating him, and that person still seems to be Kathleen Wynne.  You might consider Andrea Horwath, and many people are if the polls are to be believed.  But Horwath hasn't presented herself as the person to beat Ford, or Wynne for that matter.  At the time when Ford and Wynne's negatives are in the starkest relief, Horwath is trying to be a sort of safe third option.  Worse yet, she seems to be leaving the door open for a power sharing arrangement with Wynne, which makes Ford the de facto choice for anyone for whom Kathleen Wynne is an absolute no.

And that is why the case for one is, necessarily, the case against the other.  No one who wants Wynne gone cares about Ford's negatives, and vice versa.

But as we all know, the reality of a deeply polarized, divided Ontario that has come about as a result of Liberal government failure is not something that we are willing to accept or confront.  Better to believe in the comforting fairy tales told to us by progressive mythmakers.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

Written by Josh Lieblein

The election is officially underway, now that the writ has dropped.  But for Toronto elites like TVO's Steve Paikin, it's important to pedantically point out to the public that the writ is not actually dropped, but drawn.  For those living in the real world though, who don't get a cool $309,443.13 public salary to be the anchor of a program that next to no-one watches, couldn't care less about this jargony technicality.

Yet this is the type of thing the "downtown Toronto elite", as Ford affectionately calls them, focuses on, instead of the crippling debt and mismanagement of public funds and contracts.  When Paikin fawningly follows Wynne on her first day campaigning after the writ (i.e. a slow-motion guillotine) was dropped one has to wonder why Paikin isn't reading the mood of the province.  The Premier is historically unpopular, yet he still continues to sing her praises.  One explanation might be that Paikin's annual salary, publicly available on the Sunshine List website, has been raised $136,216 since the Liberals took power in 2003.

Instead, other media cry foul when Ford declines to supply them with a campaign bus, conducts his own interviews with his campaign staffer Lyndsey Vanstone, or some rogue operative hires astroturf actors to pose as part of a very real Ford Nation.  They claim that these are duplicitous tactics used to avoid their objective scrutiny.  They claim the Ford Nation telecasts are meant to dupe voters into believing its real news.  But is it any more dishonest than some of these news organizations that are clearly biased towards the left-wing parties, specifically the Liberals?

Just look at the case of CTV's Scott Reid.  He co-hosts CTV's show National Affairs, even though his communications firm has received tens of thousands of dollars in contracts from the provincial and federal Liberal governments.  This, of course, isn't disclosed in his CTV bio.  So in the cases of Paikin and Reid — among others — do they really have a leg to stand on in criticizing Ford for doing his own Ford Nation interviews with Vanstone posing as a journalist?  It seems a hell of a lot more upfront than these people on the take from the government pretending they're honestly holding politicians from all sides feet to the fire equally.  Fortunately, it looks like the general public are seeing through all of this gross pretentiousness.  Ford's support remains steady in recent polls despite the daily onslaught of attacks from the press.

Attacks like patronizingly asking Ford how a law is made, then collectively freaking out when Ford declines to play their game and calls it out as a gotcha question.  One really shouldn't take the press seriously until they start to ask Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath explain how compounding debt and interest work.

Ford might not know the ins and outs of provincial government, or that a writ is drawn, not dropped, but at least he hasn't completely lost the plot like these sanctimonious, snivelling downtown elites about to be put in their rightful place come June 7.

Photo Credit: TVO

Written by Graeme C. Gordon