Liberals Win Big in Ontario

[HEyHEY]

Bye bye PC Ontario you done pissed off folk!

TORONTO - Dalton McGuinty will be the next premier of Ontario and head a majority government as the Liberal Party won 72 of the 103 seats in the province's legislature.

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/10/02/ontpolls_closed031003

[Maple]

1. Great news!

.

[HEyHEY]

3. I heard in Ontario

They had a mini-election with all the Schools in Ontario. The real candidates came and spoke..that kind of thing...the PC got NO seats in that election.

[Maple]

4. The schools

had major cutbacks. Doesn't exactly turn kids on.

[HEyHEY]

6. I remember all that hubbub

I like to think of it as future left wing stock though :-)

[glarius]

9. I knew we Ontarians would boot out Oil- can Ernie!!!!

The provincial conservatives showed the same arrogance as the federal conservatives under Mulroney....They're lucky they even got the seats they did tonight....When they start the right wing tinkering with our medical and school systems...that's their undoing....When will they learn that we don't want a right wing agenda in this country....

[Nottingham]

2. Whoo Hoo!

:bounce:

How can the Northerners be so Liberal and the Southerners so Conservative

[durutti]

28. The Liberal Party isn't Liberal

It's centrist. The New Democratic Party is more leftist/social-democratic.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

29. But they are socially progressive and have....

successfully fought off the right wingers!

[goforit]

5. Way to go Canucks!!!

The tide just may turn to the positive sooner than we all think!!!

[HEyHEY]

7. Love this snip

"Eves told his defeated caucus "you've helped turn Ontario around, you've put this province and this country back on track. You have made a difference".

"We have changed the face of Ontario and Canadian politics for all time," he said."

Get over yourself Ernie who do you think you are RALPH KLEIN?

[CanuckAmok]

11. What he said is true...

...but probably not in the way he meant it.

Don't rejoice too hard, people. Canadian "Liberal" party politics should always be contained by those quotation marks. The modern Liberal Party, while a far better choice than the Conservatives or the whackjob Alliance parties, is still fairly right of centre.

Get the NDP back in, and then I'll celebrate!

BTW, I can't wait to stuff this down the throat of my old highschool/military friend, as conservative an Ontarian as you're likely to meet...

[HEyHEY]

12. I don't agree with ya canuck

I think the right wing revoloution occured mainly with Klein as the front man not Harris. But I grew up in The West and got more ALberta Coverage so that could be the reason for our differences.

[CanuckAmok]

15. If the ONT Libs are anything like Campbell's "Liberals"...

...you'll be hard-pressed to see much change in the Legislature.

But it is a step in the right direction...not the "right" direction.

[HEyHEY]

16. WANT CAMPBVELL GONE

I mean there is right wing then there is just plain.....Campbell. No one voted for private parks or any of the other things he;s done.

[CanuckAmok]

17. he's just made a killing on a Vancouver property he had the

public fund for him...and of course the press are ignoring this scandal. They spent $600,000 investigating Clark, and ZERO investigating Gordo's dubious penthouse scam.

[HEyHEY]

18. It's funny, I don't like Clark

But for all the character assanation he went through..the liberals are just as hated and did it on their own, without the press.

[CanuckAmok]

19. not a Clark fan either, but...

...that was a textbook example of an anti-progressive witch-hunt.

[Spazito]

21. I strongly disagree!

I voted for the NDP their first term and they self-destructed, with NO help needed from the press or anyone else! Clark was the antithesis of what the NDP used to stand for and he took the party down big time!

The current "liberal" party is simply retread Socreds but they will stay in office until the NDP party rebuilds based on the policies and principles they USED to espouse.

End of rant, from someone who WAS a strong supporter of the NDP

[HEyHEY]

23. What we meant was

Or at least what I meant was that while the NDP was incompetent. The Press tried to make them look evil. The liberals look evil all on their own.

[Spazito]

24. LOL, can't argue much with that!

Campbell sucks for sure!

[iverglas]

25. it always amazes me

"Don't rejoice too hard, people. Canadian "Liberal" party politics should always be contained by those quotation marks. The modern Liberal Party, while a far better choice than the Conservatives or the whackjob Alliance parties, is still fairly right of centre."

Yuppers. While the Liberal Party may be generally "socially liberal", it is an absolutely right-wing party. Its saving grace is that it will usually do whatever is necessary to stay in power, so it can ofttimes be made to operate as a sort of public-opinion-poll government. As long as public opinion hugs the left side of the line economically for the next little while, we have some hope.

I have a confession to make. I voted Liberal. I've never once done it before, and I hope never to have to do it again. I actually voted (Stanfield) Tory in 1974, knowing that the NDP had no hope in my riding and being willing to do almost anything to oust the (Trudeau) Liberals.

This time, in a riding that has traditionally had pretty tight 3-way races and that has vaccillated between NDP and Liberal at both the provincial and federal levels, and where the appalling piece of shit local newspaper had endorsed the Tory, I voted strategically Liberal, with my nose firmly pinched. The Conservatives had to go so badly that it really didn't matter who replaced them.

The idiots were the people who voted "strategically" in strong NDP ridings -- you don't vote abandon the NDP and vote Liberal to defeat a Conservative, where the Conservative hasn't got a hope in hell of winning no matter who you vote for. Duh.

The NDP, with 7 seats now, is one short of official party status in the legislature -- which means no research and other funds. The Liberals' decision on whether to extend official status will be interesting. If they don't, thereby undermining the credible left voice in the legislature -- and further disenfranchising the 14.7% of the electorate who voted NDP (and others like myself who mortgaged our souls to the Liberals), who are now represented by only 6.8% of the seats in the house -- one might suspect that McGuinty prefers not to have to face challenges to live up to some of that "liberal" agenda.

The popular vote breaks down like this:

LIB 46.45%
PC 34.64%
NDP 14.70%
other 4.21%

The Liberals got less than 50% of the popular vote, but have 70% of the seats. If we had proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post, the seats in the house would break down 48-36-15-4 rather than the 72-24-7 we actually have. And the Greens would have a couple of seats too.

.

[HEyHEY]

26. Big deal...when I was 18 I voted Reform

And last Federal I voted Bloc Quebecois (I was living in Quebec and knew no other candidate had a chance in HELL at winning, so I figured "Hey I'll be the first British Columbian to vote Bloc." And last election in BC I voted Liberal...just to get the screw up NDP out of power. But like the rest of the province we didn't know we were electing satan

[iverglas]

27. yer right ... can't top that!

Voting Tory pre-Mulroney (my Tory vote was 10 years pre-Mulroney) is something that the younger generation might not get -- it really was not like voting Alliance!

Back then we still had Red Tories, or at least pinko ones. The socially-responsible, culturally Canadian ones. For a century, it really had been Liberals in favour of continental economic integration and Tories for cultural/economic sovereignty. Then came Mulroney.

"And last election in BC I voted Liberal...just to get the screw up NDP out of power. But like the rest of the province we didn't know we were electing satan"

Yeah, well, I could have told you if you'd asked.

The BC NDP may have been screw-ups, as was Bob Rae in Ontario in some respects. But neither of them was satan. The Harris/Eves Tories that Ontario elected to spite Bob very definitely were satan. So even though the Ontario Liberals are too, at least they'll be satan-lite by comparison.

Ain't it lovely when you have such luminous choices to make in the polling booth? Hmm ... satan, satan lite, or a vote for the good guys that in a close race might be a vote against satan lite and therefore for satan ...

Oh, speaking of polling booths: our southern neighbours might also be interested to hear how we knew the outcome of the election about a half hour after the polls closed. Pieces of paper with "X"s marked in pencil on them, all counted by hand. (This was just about the first municipal, federal or provincial election in 30 years when I wasn't scrutineering -- watching the counting of ballots on behalf of the NDP candidate; it was a bad month for an election, for me.)

Much as we despise Liberals in our house, we popped a cork about 8:45, when we were sure, to celebrate the departure of the more satanic ones.

You wouldn't remember Uncle Bill Davis and the Ontario Tories of the 60s and 70s. A modern USAmerican would have mistaken them for the Green Party.

;)

.

[TahitiNut]

8. Thank you!

.

[TahitiNut]

10. kick

:-)

[expatriot]

13. dupe

this LBN thread


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=145671\


and this GD thread on the elections...


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=458996

[HEyHEY]

14. well before I posted it

I looked for Three pages and saw nothing...so what do ya want from me?

[TahitiNut]

20. Sorry about that

I should've seen that, but didn't. If I had, I would've locked this one instead of the other one. For technical reasons, I'll now have to leave the other locked as is and let this thread prevail. (I, too, have erasers on my pencils.)

(FWIW, the other thread was also incorrectly titled. That adds to the confusion in finding dupes.)

Thank you for your patience and understanding,
TahitiNut
DU moderator

[Spazito]

22. I just want to point out that...

the title on the other thread was the title used from CBC and it was posted the night of the election. I don't have any problem with it being locked as it is older than this one and this one has more current info as it occurs after the final vote count. I just wanted to clarify that the title was correct at the time.

[LeftistGorilla]

30. I voted Liberal....

but I'm an NDP at heart....but we needed those PC bastards out quick...