Policies and the OLP: Asking the wrong question.

I’ve been asked several times on Twitter (and offline) for my opinions on what policies the Ontario Liberals should be thinking about during their leadership campaign. This is my (likely futile) attempt to answer the question, by saying “it’s the wrong question”.

Two caveats:

1. This post is going to be critical and full of armchair quarterbacking, which is the easiest thing in the world to do. Governing is impossibly tough. I get that.
2. The biggest issue for the Ontario Liberal Party is “how can we fundraise enough to be financially viable in the future”? I’ll leave that to the experts.

So here’s my armchair quarterback view, from a guy who has helped parties design public policy: Thinking about policy first is putting the cart before the horse. There are two questions that need to be answered first:

1. What is your vision for the province?
2. What are the biggest (no more than 5) problems that need to be addressed in order for the province to achieve that vision?

Once you know what problems you’re trying to fix, then you can design policies to tackle those problems, using something like the Public Policy Keltner List. Otherwise, you’re simply designing policy for the sake of designing policy.

I think it’s been fairly clear from my writing and tweets over the past few years that while I quite like Kathleen Wynne as a person, I wasn’t an enthusiastic supporter of her government (though they’re looking awfully good compared to the current bunch). In the last election, I did vote for the Liberal candidate in my riding, Yasir Naqvi, because I think he’s an excellent politician (and person). Otherwise, I likely would have voted for the Greens.

My biggest issue with the previous government (beyond their botching the autism file), is that I never really got a good sense of what they were trying to do, what problems they were trying to solve, what their vision for the province was. There’s was a grab-bag of policies that looked focus group designed to target NDP-Liberal voters along with a strange obsession with talking about future balanced budgets (and then not actually balancing the budget) and massive amounts of corporate welfare.

One senior Liberal type recently tweeted to me that the Wynne government was about “economic security”, which if I squint I can sort of see. My response to that:

1. They never put that together in any kind of compelling way, again it came across (to me, anyway) as a grab bag of policies.
2. Any government that concerned themselves with “economic security” would not have taken so long to address rising consumer electricity prices.

This is why knowing what you’re trying to accomplish is so important — it not only helps you communicate with voters, it also helps you identify issues before they blow up in your face as retail electricity prices did.

Here’s where the Liberals can learn from Doug Ford’s PCs. Yes, you heard that right. I know two of the responses to this will be:

1. The PCs who ran on no policies, without an election platform?
2. The Ford PCs won by default.

To which my responses are:

1. Have you learned nothing from this post? You’re asking the wrong questions.
2. Nonsense. If you keep telling yourself that, they’ll win the next election.

Let’s address the second part first. In 2018, Doug Ford PCs earned over 2.3 million votes (2,326,632, if you’re counting). That shattered the old record, set by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals in 2003, of less than 2.1 million (2,090,001, again if you’re counting). People were clearly motivated to vote for them, in a big way. They were also willing to overlook the lack of policy because they felt had a pretty good idea how Doug Ford would govern.

So what was their vision? What did they stand for? I see three things:

1. Reducing the deficit and cutting waste.
2. Reduce the cost of living for “folks” (“polluters not commuters”, “buck a beer”, etc.)
3. Anti-elitism (or as the Beaverton cleverly put it: Ontario PCs pass resolution to only recognize the two genders: folks and elites).

This government will get replaced at some point, in part because people will have other interests (health care, education), in part because Ford is already falling down on this vision (hiring your buddies for expensive posts goes against the deficit, the cost of living, and anti-elitism), in part because people will tire of this circus, and in part because someone better will come along.

And I’m pretty sure that “someone better” will be able to sell Ontarians a vision and be able to articulate what they’re trying to do, not just have a grab bag of policies.