ONTARIO ELECTION WATCH 2022, CW EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MAY 1, 2022 : Barring unforseen prospects the, as it were, official official campaign for the Ontario election that takes place on Thursday, June 2 will begin this coming Wednesday, May 4. Today’s Sunday editorial meeting here considered a dozen relevant recent news items. Before just briefly […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 21 MARCH 2022. [UPDATED 22 MARCH]. A friend, colleague, (fellow amateur musician), and person deeply into progressive party politics in Canada’s most populous province said to me yesterday, with a shrug of resignation (and only the slightest hint of a question mark) : “Well I guess Doug Ford […]

The Ontario legislature has returned to work this week. And already it seems clear enough that the biggest issue in Ontario politics this fall is whether there will be a fresh election before the December holiday season. See, eg, such recent headlines as : “Ontario’s Premier Wynne shaking up her campaign team in lead-up to […]

Not long ago I overheard a local politician of more or less conservative bent answering a question about Kathleen Wynne’s performance as Ontario Liberal premier so far.  Some people, he suggested, belong to a party because they know they couldn’t get elected if they belonged to the party of their heart. Premier Wynne is a […]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 30]. A sentence in  one of Martin Regg Cohn’s recent Toronto Star columns (Saturday, October 27, 2012) has revived some of my enthusiasm for what strikes some among us as a benign potential Ontario political development, that has lately seemed to have slid too far beyond the pale of realization in the real […]

Not too long ago the estimable Graham Murray, publisher of the Ontario government and politics newsletter Inside Queen’s Park, circulated an excellent paper on the “46 Ontario by-elections from 1977-2010.”Â  It concluded that these contests “did more to maintain the status quo than to transform it … [m]ost of the seats contested (32 / 69%) […]

[UPDATED JUNE 17, 18, 19, 20]. If you are among those in the small crowd of Ontario government and politics watchers  who thought the current McGuinty minority government’s budget was more or less secure, and are a bit surprised to suddenly discover that we may actually be having a fresh election on the issue this […]

[UPDATED MAY 8]. In this past Saturday’s Toronto Star Queen’s Park columnist  Martin Regg Cohn predicted that the current “feel-good political chemistry between [Liberal minority Premier] Dalton [McGuinty] and [NDP leader] Andrea [Horwath] will prove short-lived.” A week is a long time in politics, etc. And despite the recent Dalton-Andrea budget deal: “Their parties are […]

[UPDATED APRIL 22, 23]. Contrary to many prognostications, the dance of Larry Zolf’s Winnipeg dialectic between Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals and Andrea Horwath’s Ontario New Democrats, over the current Liberal major-minority government’s Budget 2012, has not yet shown decisive signs of coming to some stable point of rest. (Well … that too has now changed, […]