Challenging Incumbents is More Important Than Ever
A first-time voter urges Ontarians to rise above pandemic-era election fatigue when they head to the polls in June.
Photo: Nathan Denette, CP
Amid all the upheaval Covid-19 has wrought in Canada, one pattern has persisted: voters in pandemic elections, clutching at any semblance of stability, have been hesitant to put opposition parties into power. This trend has held true from sea to sea. The year 2020 saw British Columbia and New Brunswick re-elect incumbent governments, and last fall Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prevailed in a lacklustre federal campaign widely believed to be unnecessary.
Uncertainty around the new Omicron Variant may mean, similarly, that Ontario's Progressive Conservative government believes it can coast to re-election when the province’s voters head to the polls on June 22. Premier Doug Ford has availed himself of every opportunity to pose as a steady, reliable leader—for instance, by holding over 190 daily press briefings, routinely viewed by hundreds of thousands of Ontarians. The province’s voters’ desire for stability and continuity is reflected in recent polls. According to an Innovative Research Group survey, 28 percent of Ontarians think that Ford would make the best premier, compared to only 20 and 10 per cent for the NDP and Liberal leaders, respectively.
There are historical precedents for the re-election of incumbents in times of crisis. Sandford Borins, a professor of public management at the University of Toronto, told me in an interview that there is a “tendency for governing parties to win ... during war times, thinking of World War One and World War Two.” Some of the most successful campaigns in rocky periods of our history have hinged on party leaders exploiting citizens’ fear of instability—the federal Liberals’ 1935 campaign slogan “King or Chaos,” most notably.
In 2022, such electoral inertia is, arguably, both impractical for our immediate needs and, worse, dangerous for our democracy. A crisis like a pandemic means that it is even more important than usual for the public to regard opposition parties as viable governments in waiting. It is a question of voter confidence: citizens must believe that any major party can effect stability and therefore confer legitimacy on any electoral outcome.
One reason we must be more discerning than ever is that the vast pandemic-induced expansion of the state means that voters today have an outsized stake in the question of who oversees the public sector. Legislation mandating stay-at-home orders or the bailout of entire industries should inspire rather than quell voters’ scrutiny of various party platforms. To date, however, this has not happened. Rather, pandemic-era inertia appears to have engendered public apathy. As federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh remarked about the 2021 federal election’s 62% voting rate, “This is the lowest turnout despite one of the biggest crises we've ever faced.”
Replacing incumbent parties is unlikely to result in radical change—ironically, perhaps, because so much of the pandemic recovery effort has been spearheaded by unelected public servants. Think about how much more public confidence has been inspired by Dr. Theresa Tam as compared to the Liberal Party, with its myriad ethics violations, or by Dr. Anthony Fauci as compared to American presidents Trump and Biden.
Furthermore, even when emergencies arise, the myriad prosaic issues that inform citizens’ daily lives do not disappear. Sara Singh, deputy leader of the NDP and MPP for Brampton Centre told me via email that “Doug Ford didn’t even wait for the pandemic to end before going right back to his harmful agenda of cuts.… The things that Ontarians were worried about before the pandemic haven’t gone away.” Many urgent social and economic issues, such as homelessness, wealth inequality and debt, have worsened in the COVID-19 period, and thus warrant serious consideration by voters.
With only six months to go until this year's provincial election, Ontario’s two main opposition parties have so far done an abysmal job of convincing the public of their readiness to govern. Both have been slow to build the case for themselves and too eager to find cracks in the policies of the governing Tories. The NDP, for instance, has released a barrage of attack ads with slogans like “Here for his buddies, not for you” aimed at Premier Doug Ford, and “Back for power, not for you” directed at Liberal leader Steven Del Duca. MPP Sara Singh told me that half of her party’s ads to date have been combative as opposed to sharing Andrea Horwath’s “vision and plans.” Dr. Cochrane concurs, telling me, “I don't think that the NDP has been able to successfully get its message out there around what it’s been doing in its time as the opposition.”
Attack ads and superficial negativity may work in conventional (non-emergency) elections. There is an old adage, one that David Cochrane, a researcher in Canadian government at the University of Toronto, related to me in an interview, namely that “governments don’t get voted in, they get voted out.” In light of the insecurity many voters are feeling during the pandemic, it behooves the opposition parties not to appeal to them exclusively on the basis of the governing party’s faults. This is a cynical strategy and, in an advanced democracy like Ontario’s, it is almost certain to fail.
Conventional political science reminds us that two of the main reasons people do not vote have been pervasive in the pandemic years: alienation, where people are overwhelmed by information they do not understand, and fatigue, where they feel bombarded by too much politics in general. That said, we have before us, in the case of the 2022 provincial election, an opportunity to buck the trend of electoral lassitude. An emergency like the pandemic means that voters need to lean in now more than ever to make informed political decisions—something the Liberals and New Democrats have an opportunity and an obligation to facilitate.
This election will be my first. I turned eighteen only a couple weeks after the last federal election in September, thus I was forced to look on with envy as large numbers of students from my university campus headed out to local Elections Canada stations to cast their votes. This June's provincial vote may take place amid growing Covid-19 case counts, or, if some of the more optimistic preliminary assessments of the Omicron Variant hold, the reverse. Either way, we must take seriously our shared responsibility to rise above electoral fatigue and inertia and, if needs be, jettison the incumbent.