Marit Stiles sagt laut, was viele Ontariorier denken. Warum also werden sie nicht für sie stimmen?
https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/marit-stiles-says-out-loud-what-many-ontarians-are-thinking-so-why-wont-they-vote-for-her/article_9c4d7518-5079-4434-bdce-8605abf0a460.html
16 Kommentare
It’s simple. Politicians wrapped in conservative branding are held to a much lower standard than others due to four decades of media conditioning, the reinforcement of a completely false “both sides” narrative, and the false intertwining of the terms “conservative” and “capitalist”.
Conservatism isn’t capitalism and capitalism isn’t conservatism. Some politicians absolutely are out to line their own pockets and nothing more, but the vast majority absolutely aren’t. And the news media is owned by people who benefit from reactionary, populist, anarcho-capitalist trickle-down nonsense being framed as “common sense conservatism”, “economic common sense”, etc, while anything that actually seeks to *conserve* the status quo and social order get described as “socialism”, “communism”, “leftist/liberal virtue signalling”, and more. Because to actually *conserve* the status quo and social order does require some amount of regulatory and legislative intervention, and a level of taxation that they all fought hard to eliminate.
The result is that society has this ingrained falsehood of what “conservative” means, and we’ve been taught that anyone who doesn’t want exactly that is an insane person who just wants to punish people for being successful, while lining their pockets at the expense of Hard Working Taxpayers™.
Because saying what people want to hear doesn’t win you votes unless you have the track record to back it up. Yelling about what Ford is doing doesn’t turn his supporters to you, actions will. No party has presented a candidate that can overcome the party’s own issues. The OLP can’t even handle a by election without allegations of fraud and electoral failures. The NDP hasn’t been relevant in well over a decade, and seems to get bogged down by their own mistakes and focus on identity politics.
The people voting in Ford don’t care about pronouns, gender/race issues, or any of that sort. They care about keeping taxes down, their portfolios up, and the gravy train rolling. If you’re in the position to benefit or profit off the stuff Ford has done, he’s done you very well. Everyone else got boned. The problem is not enough people vote, so the people happy with Ford keep him in power while the other parties fail to organize enough to fight him.
Reading the user comments for that article is very interesting and provide just as much insight into the question. Some of the reasons include, in no particular order:
– „Fringe“ views / inheriting the federal party’s policies
– Don’t give suggestions on their vision / what they’d actually do if in power
– Ontario is centrist.
– Bob Rae & the 1990 NDP government
– Too much negative messaging
– They’re anti-business
– Union support has dwindled.
I stopped reading by that point. No doubt some of this is noise or are from staunch OLP or PC voters.
The main reasons: biased media coverage, and an antiquated electoral system that favours the largest 2 political parties. Neither of those problems is likely to be solved anytime soon.
The Liberal brand also took a massive hit due to Trudeau. Carney bucked that by not being a traditional politician, is more conservative, and the Trump fiasco.
The U.S. question isn’t as relevant provincially, the Trudeau stink iingers and Stiles doesn’t have Carney gravitas to shake it.
Quite simply:
* The NDP has not had a credible shot at winning my riding in my lifetime; and
* The NDP has not convinced me that they’re better than both the Greens and the Liberals.
* Edit: No amount of my 3rd-favourite party explaining why they’re better than my 4th-favourite party is going to change my vote.
I don’t vote for candidates which are neither my favourite nor (credibly) capable of winning my riding.
The NDP needs to present itself as a serious governing party. Much of the shenanigans – albeit, at the federal level – gives me the sense that the party is run by a bunch of idealistic activists, and not by people with serious intent to govern. Severing from the federal party would also help, surely.
I have some thoughts, but NDP supporters aren’t going to like it. I don’t think any of this is *good* or the way it *should* be, but I think its the way it *is*.
The NDP give off loser energy. Winners don’t need to talk about how great their candidates are, everyone knows. If you have to keep telling me how great Stiles is, that means she isn’t. That goes for complaining about biased media coverage. It may be true, but complaining about it isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. Also, saying that people are too stupid to vote for their own interests. They aren’t stupid, they have different values from you, and being unable to reckon with that means they will never vote for you.
Paul Wells famously said that „[the candidate who auditions for the role of opposition leader will get the job](https://paulwells.substack.com/p/wellss-rules)“. Her holding Ford to account over his many, many scandals comes across like this.
I would say the exact same things about the federal conservatives and Poilievre as well.
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I used to put a lot of blame on media and just general knowledge, that sort of naive assumption that if people knew what I knew they would feel similarly. And I think that can play a role, our media is deeply corporate, like the Star, and I don’t think we should downplay how we’ve treated and even criminalized what I’ll generally call „leftish“ thought historically. The NDP’s perpetual internal debate over whether using the word socialist is problematic should be proof of that.
At the end of the day though, I think most people just fundamentally don’t believe in the ideology and no amount of awareness will overcome an ideological mindset. I think you get two camps, one that just don’t care about others, they got theirs, fuck you, they can’t imagine a world where their own actions aren’t the single greatest factor in their own success. No amount of data will change that, they wake up knowing if they were born anywhere they’d still be successful and anyone on the street deserves it.
And the other camp, who sometimes acknowledges the flaws in the system but strongly believe it’s still the best possible system that will bring about the greatest prosperity, even if it isn’t shared equally. A factory using child labour in Bangladesh isn’t an outrage, it’s an economic opportunity. The best way to preserve the environment is turning it into a commodity and letting the natural fairness of the market solve it. If you really want to get their motor running explain to them how hunting endangered species is actually helping them if you consider the money you get from the hunt that can be used for preservation.
There are a lot of comfortable Canadians that got theirs and believe they earned it, they make for a poor constituency for a party that acknowledges the fundamental systemic inequities in our society and is trying to build a world where everyone has something approaching equal opportunity. Some of these measures are popular individually, like socialized medicine or subsidized daycare but anything that changes the fundamental unfairness of the system, like a wealth or inheritance tax and puts people on an equal footing? Deeply unpopular and it’s hard to enact the former without the latter.
That constituency is also constantly in flux, votes less, and itself can get comfortable and move on. I don’t think most Unions are even part of that constituency anymore, a lot of those workers are well off and have more class interest with small business owners than anything else. They vote Conservative because construction work and taxes, just look at Sarnia’s electoral history.
NDP style parties seem to do best when there’s a charismatic leader that can trick enough Canadians to actually follow the rhetoric they usually profess to believe in but those only come along every so often and I bet you’ll never hear about the next one because by then what institutions will even be around to give coverage.
That’s my cope anyway
It doesn’t matter what the leader is like if they consistently run dog shit candidates.
Provincially candidates matter. And the ONDP has had some awful candidates.
Apologies if someone else has already said this, but there’s a four word reason why Stiles and every other NDP candidate faces a relentless uphill battle:
First past the post.
Voters don’t think there’s a chance the NDP will win, so they don’t vote for them, and that lets the Liberals keep stealing their lunches by „campaigning left and governing right“. They win over people who would vote for the NDP (if they only had a chance) by offering up some NDP-aligned policies, but quickly chart a course back to the centre once they’re elected.
There’s an unavoidable vicious cycle where it’s hard to get people who present as slick, likeable winners to want to sign up to lose every time for the sake of principle.
I don’t really agree with the premise, that Stiles says what Ontarians are thinking, but let’s ignore that for a second and just look at pure math.
Ontario can roughly be divided up into 3 sections of mostly equal proportions, Urban, Suburban, and Rural. You need to win 2 of these to win an election. Currently the NDP does okay in Urban areas, but they have basically no support in the Suburbs and Rurals.
No matter what changes, they currently cannot mathematically win, since neither of those 2 areas agree with the NDP on many issues.
Federal party is an anchor. I prefer her to whatever insider is anointed to the Liberals and to Doug Ford. But, would never vote NDP federally and it hurts her brand.
I’ll break it down to four points:
1. She comes across as rather unlikeable and has no professional qualifications to speak of. For my part, I’ve met her out of the spotlight a number of times and actually find her quite charming (if a little socially awkward).
2. Union support has been split on the ONDP-PC with most blue collar support falling behind the PCs. Quite frankly, a party backed by office workers doesn’t seem like much of a party of labour to me.
3. A weak caucus. None of them particularly stand out as future cabinet ministers and perhaps worse of in the short term, none are notably strong communicators (a big problem as Stiles isn’t a particularly strong communicator herself)
4. I think she also suffered from being surrounded by ONDP diehards that not only had little political sense, but were unwilling to pivot from their Horwath-era losing playbook. Perhaps with the Manitoba NDP staff she has now poached she may be able to turn her favours somewhat, but unfortunately first impressions are unfairly important.
The NDP has to work with the Liberals. In the early 80s, both parties realized this. If they aren’t going to work together than Ontario voters won’t take them seriously. I hope the next OLP leader can extend the olive branch, because Crombie and Horwath were both more motivated by their personal ambitions.
The same voters who gave Rae a majority in 1990 gave Peterson a majority in 1987. The same voters who made the NDP the official opposition in 2018 gave Wynne her majority 4 years prior. Work together!