This is the only Ontario election in memory in which a party with a reasonable chance of winning threw it away by introducing a policy voters found totally unacceptable and the big question is why it did so.
Political science junkies will be studying for years why Progressive Conservative leader John Tory, despite little pressure on him, promised to provide funding to private, faith-based schools.
Tory was only five percent behind Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals at the time, and a few weeks later had fallen to 10 percent behind, and then said he would not go ahead with his plan unless the public showed it wanted it.
His miscalculation has given him a reputation for poor judgment and weakened his claim to be a leader.
No party has fallen as swiftly on a single issue before. Conservative premier Ernie Eves lost in 2003 because his party’s popularity had been eroded steadily by the cuts in services and confrontational style of his predecessor, Mike Harris.
McGuinty failed in 1999 because Harris still retained some appeal from his tax cuts, and New Democrat premier Bob Rae in 1995 because he ran up huge deficits and abandoned key promises.
Liberal premier David Peterson was sent packing because he called an election after only two years and was viewed as more concerned about Constitutional change than bread and butter issues.
Conservative premier Frank Miller is being cited as losing because his predecessor, William Davis, extended funding to Roman Catholic high schools, but this is stretching too far to find links to the past. Miller was seen as too right-wing and small town and afraid to be compared when he refused to debate opposition leaders on TV.
Tory was running for the first time as leader, but had worked in back rooms of a dozen campaigns dating back to the 1970s. He had the most experienced campaign manager in Canada, John Laschinger, who has run more than 20 at the federal, provincial and municipal levels and would manage your bid to be president of the local Rotary Club if you paid him.
Tory also worked for and is a disciple of Davis, who has been his key adviser on faith-based schools and was noted for living by polls.
Tory’s party took a poll to see if it was safe and told news media it found many more supporting funding than opposing it.
Tory’s poll would have asked, in the way polls often are designed to elicit support for those commissioning them, whether funding already provided Catholics should be extended in fairness to other faith-based schools.
Most asked this question and knowing little more about the issue would have had difficulty disagreeing with widening funding.
But their support evaporated when they heard the other side of the argument, brought out by McGuinty, civil rights activists and others, that children of different faiths learn to understand and respect each other when they are educated together and should not be further divided.
Tory’s Conservatives have lost any chance of winning the election because they failed to recognize voters may change their minds on an issue when they have more information and the rest of us have been given an extra reason to be wary of polls.
Eric Dowd is a veteran of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
