Shouting fire in a crowded province

The province of Ontario has a GDP of more than half a trillion dollars. It has a population of over 12 million. It is a great big province, with great strengths, and great weaknesses: decrepit infrastructure, a vulnerable manufacturing base, mediocre public services. Yet it has just spent an entire election campaign frightening itself to death over a proposal to spend $400-million -- less than one half of one per cent of the provincial budget -- to bring 50 thousand kids into the public school system: two percent of provincial enrollment. Eek! A mouse!...

How did it happen? How did a modest attempt to correct an obvious inequity -- the funding of one sort of religious school, Catholic, to the exclusion of all others -- come to dominate, indeed consume the election? Certainly the governing Liberals can take a lot of the credit, if that’s the word. In the jittery aftermath of September 11 and the arrest, little more than a year ago, of 18 Muslims on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, the Grits could tell the public was in no mood for anything that even hinted at ethnic or religious separatism.

So they demagogued it six ways to Sunday. History will record that the premier of Ontario, in the year 2007, could begin a televised debate with a veiled -- you should pardon the expression -- warning that the Conservatives’ religious schools proposal would mean “strife in the streets,” of the kind witnessed in “Paris and London.” Hmmm. Paris... London... What sort of strife could he have meant? Could he have had in mind... the Muslim kind? The beauty of it was, the Liberals never had to say it out loud: “eek, a Muslim!” The premier could appear to be singing the same old hymns to tolerance and pluralism, even as he was exploiting much darker sentiments.

Much the same hysteria surfaced in the accompanying referendum on proportional representation: the first thing those opposed were likely to call to mind was, what if a Muslim party started up? Never mind that the entire Muslim population of Ontario, at 3% of the total, would have to vote for the Muslim party -- and only one -- to get over the 3% threshold the plan entailed. This was Ontario’s version of Quebec’s “reasonable accommodation” hearings, and Ontarians, it was clear, were not in a mood to be particularly reasonable.

The press soon picked up the scent. Once the first signs of trouble appeared, compounded by the Conservative leader’s fumbling attempts to explain the policy, the media narrative was locked in: Tories in schools policy death-march. Every day, reporters asked John Tory a thousand variations on the same question: Are you doomed? Has the schools policy sealed your doom? Why has it sealed your doom? How? If you were a tree, what sort of doomed tree would you be?

But ultimately this isn’t anyone’s fault but Mr. Tory’s. Politicians are in the media manipulation business. If the other fellows do it better than you, you should find another line of work. The problem wasn’t the policy, as unpopular as it proved to be. The problem was that Mr. Tory had nothing else to talk about. Politics abhors a vacuum, and if you aren’t filling it, your opponents will.

The contrast with Mike Harris is striking. In the Common Sense Revolution campaign of 1995, Mr. Harris would announce something at least as obnoxious every day of the week. Monday, he would propose that criminals should be plunged in boiling oil. Tuesday, he would unveil his “Fund Health Care From Schoolkids’ Lunch Money” policy. Wednesday was “Mandatory Workfare for Amputees” day. And so on. His opponents never knew which appalling proposal they should hit him for first, or what even worse one he might announce next. Whereas poor Mr. Tory might as well have held up a sign reading: Fire When Ready.

Indeed, for all his attempts at distancing himself from the Harris legacy, the Liberals merrily hammered him for that, too. He got all of the negatives of that association, with none of the positives: back to back majorities don’t just happen, after all. So it will be interesting to see whether the Tories learn any lessons from this debacle, as they so signally did not after the last.

In two elections under the “divisive” Mr. Harris, they took 45% of the popular vote. Under first the conciliatory Ernie Eves and now the obliging Mr. Tory, that number has dwindled to first 35 and now 32 per cent. It turns out, bland doesn’t work. All of Mr. Tory’s efforts to turn the Conservatives into a less mendacious version of the Liberals -- in an editorial board meeting with this newspaper, he could not name a single thing the government is doing now that it shouldn’t, or a single program he would cut -- have only succeeded in persuading the public that, indeed, the Liberals were right.

So that on the one or two occasions when he departed from the Liberal script -- a tax cut here, a religious schools policy there -- the result was simply dissonance. The public were left scratching their heads: How to square his schools policy, with its Harrisite echoes of choice and competition, with the rest of his platform?

Even on the issue the Tory Tories thought was their ticket back to power, Mr. McGuinty’s broken promise on taxes, Mr. Tory was unable to make much headway. Mr. McGuinty would simply say, I needed the money for health care. And you know what? I still need it for health care. Who was Mr. Tory, who promised to spend billions more on health care himself, to call him a liar?

By the time Mr. Tory was forced to recant his religious schools policy, in the face of an open revolt in his party, he was reduced to insisting that the difference between himself and Mr. McGuinty was that he broke his promises before elections, rather than after. I believe he added that this was an act of “leadership.”