To crib a thought from Justin Trudeau’s late father, the universe did unfold, but not quite in the way it was designed for his son over the weekend.
Donald Trump is the wild card – the joker, if you like – in Canadian politics this season.
In Ontario, heading to the polls on June 7, Trump is a prominent feature in Premier Kathleen Wynne’s struggle for survival. Her success or failure will rest in part on her ability to persuade Ontarians that Doug Ford, the new Progressive Conservative leader, is another Trump – ill-informed, unprincipled, ignorant in the ways of the province and harbouring a social conservative agenda that would appall moderate voters, if only they knew.
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" – Robert Browning.
That may be a viable proposition in poetry, Mr. Browning, but it does not work in politics, where a reach that exceeds one’s grasp means expectations have been created but left unfulfilled.
Just ask Justin Trudeau. Unfulfilled expectations are his Achilles’ heel as he struggles to raise the Liberal government out of its midterm slump.
There’s an air of unreality about Ontario politics these days.
At Queen’s Park, Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals are pretending it is business as usual. A new session of the Legislature begins at noon on Monday with the reading of the Speech from Throne, and Finance Minister Charles Sousa will follow with his 2018 budget on March 28.
In a demonstration of organizational incompetence seldom seen in Canadian politics, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives found a way on Saturday to deny their leadership to candidate Christine Elliott, who both won the popular vote and carried a majority of the province’s 124 ridings.
Instead, Doug Ford, older brother of Toronto’s late mayor Rob Ford, was declared the winner under the party’s absurdly complicated and error-riven system of “electoral points,” which was heavily loaded in favour of ridings where the party has few members.
