I remain very interested in the reaction to last spring’s provincial election. One thing that reappears in this criticism is this incessant belief that conservatives are losing because they are practicing wedge politics. It’s a common criticism of the conservative movement. Conservatives, it’s popularly believed, like to divide the masses up. Liberals like to bring people together. It’s hogwash!
Let’s start with a definition of a wedge issue. A wedge issue is used to divide a group and get them to vote differently regardless of previous partisan affiliation. For example, abortion has historically been a classical wedge issue for both liberals and conservatives. Pro-lifers transcend partisan affiliation. Many Liberal Catholics, for example, are pro-life. Similarly, many libertarian and moderate Conservatives wish to maintain a woman’s right to choose. Taking a stance on abortion, then, attempts to shift the political sands away from partisan affiliation to an issue-based affiliation. Witness Justin Trudeau’s aggressive pro-choice stance. It’s being done to try to entice moderate female Conservative voters to vote Liberal in the next election. Don’t be fooled, ladies and gentlemen – Liberals are masters at wedge politics too!
Taking a look at the last provincial election, it’s true that the PCs had some wedge issues. However, their strongest one, which was their policy on worker choice, was abandoned before the election (some may say that abandoning it made it worse for the PCs since the policy angered the union members to aggressively campaign against Hudak anyway, but the PCs couldn’t aggressively try to court over disgruntled union and non-union members who voted for other parties because the policy was dead). There were two other major wedge issues that the PCs sought. The first was courting people in the trades who were upset at the Ontario College of Trades and the new fees associated with the regulatory body. This was met with some success on the hustings, except unionized building tradespeople, by and large, support the college, thus limiting the numbers the PCs could attract. The other wedge was the opposition on green energy, particularly industrial wind farm development. The only problem with that wedge is that the Liberals used it as a wedge on the other side too. And, since there are more seats in urban than rural Ontario where these wind farms exist, it was an uphill battle for the Tories in urban Ontario.
The 100,000 job reduction plan was not designed as a wedge issue. It was designed to try and wake up hundreds of thousands of Harris-era conservatives to give Hudak a shot. It was a huge gamble that ultimately failed. However, by definition, reducing public sector workers by a large number was never meant to court public sector workers to vote PC, which would have needed to happen in order for the policy to qualify as a wedge issue. It was said, with some shock value, to wake-up disgruntled and cynical voters from casting their ballots for a party that really meant things at Queen’s Park were going to change.
Now let’s look at the Liberals. Their policies were full of wedge issues, and many of them wedged the NDP and Tories, but in different ways. The classic wedge for the Liberals was the Ontario pension plan. This is something that the NDP had long promoted, but since the NDP saw an accessible PC voter pool, they opted not to endorse the idea. For New Democratic supporters, they felt their party turned away from them and chose the Liberals. For Tories, the issue became one of pitting fairness, i.e. everyone should have a pension of some kind, versus an argument on potential damage to private industry, versus not trusting a government that has mismanaged their own finances with working people’s pensions. And so the Liberals tried to pick off PCs that are more motivated by the fairness argument. The minimum wage was another. The NDP had long championed the idea, but by claiming it for themselves, the Liberals could always use it to appeal to soft-NDP voters. PCs struggled between free market arguments and people who thought paying the Tim Horton’s barrista a few bucks more wasn’t such a bad thing. Inside the PC caucus, these arguments were passionately made, and there was a real fear of losing moderate PC voters had we not gone along with the plan. The entire 2014 budget (version 1) was a series of wedges. It attacked the NDP base like nothing else. More money for PSWs. Parents who were considering IVF got some money. Teachers got a half a billion dollars to win labour peace. Developmental services were promised a much needed budget boost. All of it was catastrophic for the NDP when they voted against all these things they championed. In fact, it felt for some time that the NDP were the government’s policy development team. Nevertheless, the Liberals used all of these issues to curry votes from people who were part of another party’s voter base, and chose to vote Liberal because of some goody. It was classical wedge politics that allowed the Liberals to find so many new voters even when their party brand was in tatters. In short, putting up shiny objects like more money for a variety of different things distracted voters from the Liberal record. It was a Hail Mary that worked.
Then there is infrastructure. The grand daddy of pork barrel politics. The Liberals don’t have any money to spend on infrastructure, yet they keep promising more and more – $130 billion more! The early signs that Premier Wynne was prepared to fight an election on raising taxes (errr revenue tools) quickly dissipated. Wedge politics doesn’t work when you anger some people first, after all. Even high speed rail from London through Waterloo Region to Toronto. Nobody had been talking about it until then Transportation Minister, Glenn Murray, dropped the bombshell announcement at a gathering of London, Ontario business types. We now know that they rushed the study on the high speed rail corridor before an election call. But there they were, promising everything and saying that the NDP and PCs were voting against infrastructure projects. In essence, infrastructure was used as an enormous wedge.
Promise-keeping political types are always hesitant to promise something they can’t deliver. Both opposition parties were in that predicament, which meant that their language on these projects could not be as strong as the government’s. After all, it remains irresponsible to make promises for projects when you don’t have a timeline or a way for paying for the project. Somehow, opposition parties can’t get away with just saying we’ll get a project done no matter what it takes. Now, the Wynne government, having made all these promises they can’t pay for, is asking the Prime Minister to help. And by dragging Ontario’s interests through the media, Kathleen Wynne isn’t helping herself keep the promises she made to Ontarians. And what is the obvious set up for the next election when the premier can’t deliver on her promises? She’ll blame Harper for not coming through on the promises she made to Ontario voters when she didn’t have the money to pay for them. It’s so easy to write the playbook – déjà vu.
The lesson here is not so much to replace wedge politics, unlike what some folks in PC circles are saying. The lesson is that having a true brokerage party means that we have to form a competitive electoral coalition. In order to build that electoral coalition, we’re going to need to think long and hard about what that coalition may look like, and start finding ways to talk directly to those people. The easy way to do that is through policy and an honest commitment to follow through on your policies.
For what it’s worth, there is one thing that hasn’t been said about Tim Hudak. He did not want to be beholden to special interests, and he minimized the wedges as a result. He did not want to make promises to every interest or advocacy group. He wanted, on the other hand, to very much be able to govern with as much latitude as possible to implement his agenda. Let’s face it. Hudak could have called for beer, wine and spirits in convenience stores, but didn’t. Hudak could have advocated for de-funding abortion to court social conservatives, but stayed far away from social wedge issues like that. It stood in very stark contrast to the government’s approach. They very much sought the support of groups: unions, associations, lobby groups, you name it. They relied on making promises to these groups in order to form a formidable electoral coalition. As noble as Tim Hudak’s position of not being beholden to special interests, one cannot ignore the repercussions. As Hudak and the PCs tried to campaign against the Liberals and the legions of groups that supported them, he and they could not muster an equally powerful electoral coalition to compete against it.
This portrayal of Tim Hudak’s leadership is likely to stand in stark contrast to what the leadership contestants might be feeding the grassroots Tories on the hustings. It’s true that Hudak did listen to his friends and people he trusted like every politician does. And many of these people are in lobbying roles who are able to leave making money for a short time during an election, and become loyal soldiers trying to help us win. But, to hear some PC leadership contestants rail against the lobbyists that “control” the party not only defies what actually transpired, but it completely misses the opportunity to point out that the special interests are running the government today. Not only are the special interests running the government, but the natural consequence of them doing so is that they’re running the province’s finances into the ground. For the life of me, I cannot understand why any sensible conservative doesn’t have their eyes locked on this problem and campaign on it.