The Lackluster Provincial Election Hides The Rift In Our Communities

Jeff Green | May 18, 2022

I asked the organiser for one of the election candidates this week, if they thought that the provincial election hadn't really started yet, and they said “You think?”

There has only been one candidate meeting, but it was a taped event for COGECO TV, filmed in Smiths Falls last week, with only 4 of the 8 candidates having been invited.

Tom Mulder and Marcil Lewandoski, the Ontario and New Blue Party candidates, held an event/protest in front of the TV studio.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the two men seem to have struck up a friendship that day and would like to meet up for supper after the election is over.

The candidates for what we are now calling the “traditional 4 parties” - the Green, Blue, Orange, and Red Parties, have been setting up their own events, and canvassing door to door in the vast riding working as much as they can, and signs are popping up, but people are more pre-occupied with gas and food prices, getting to yard sales and figuring out what to do as we come out of two years of pandemic life to focus on the provincial election.

The Leader's debate on Monday Night, on its own, could not have inspired much enthusiasm among the population, but it is possible that through media and social media coverage it will become a bigger event than it appeared to be at the time.

But with two weeks to go, this election appears to be more than a bit of a dud. For everyone who does not support the Ford Conservatives, this might not be a good thing, as we sleep walk to another majority based on a rebate of our car sticker fee, a promise of gas tax relief for 6 months, and a promise of prosperity, new hospitals and that the climate change crisis will solve itself without us having to alter anything in our day to day lives.

While the Liberals, NDP, and Green's are all working very hard to point out the flaws in the Conservative thrust for Ontario, and at the same time establish themselves from each other, there is something else going under the surface, something that has not gone away even though the Ottawa occupation is over and the COVID restrictions that it was supposedly about have all been lifted.

It was that protest that sparked the interest of at least two, and likely, 3 of the candidates who are running in Lanark Frontenac Kingston for alternative right wing parties.

Tom Mulder and Marcil Lewandoski both said they only got involved in politics because of the protest/occupation, and Chelsea Hillier, who is running under the banner of the Populist Party of Ontario, is also linked to the Ottawa events by her family name, if nothing else.

The election campaign is not about what happened in Ottawa, or the way opposition to COVID policies became a magnet for grievances about progressive policies around race, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies and other social justice initiatives that have been adopted in the province and the country over the past 10 years or so.

No one really knows how many of us in Frontenac County or Rural Ontario as a whole, feel that the “legacy media” is basically under government control, that the school curriculum has become ideologically opposed to the natural order of things, that Prime Minister Trudeau is not just the annoying, self righteous, privileged politician most of us thing of him as, but is a not so closeted communist bent on subverting all of our hard fought freedoms.

We have always had our political divisions in our rural communities, but one of the charms of rural life has been the way that we all live together anyway, because we can't hide from each other by sticking to our own groups, like you can in urban environments.

It generally leads to more understanding. We have enough in common to be able to avoid differences over religion, attitudes towards gender, race or ideological differences of other kinds in our daily social interactions.

But when people are not just saying vaccines are good or bad, masking is necessary or not, but saying that there is a conspiracy to how this has all been organised, in both Ontario and Canada, and this is all about making us less free to live our lives and express our opinions as we wish, something is going on in our communities.

Do we just wait, and see if these attitudes slide into the background? Do we let them come out only in jokes and asides that people smile at to acknowledge they agree with, or pretend not to hear if they don't? Do we, should we, go back to the way it was before?

Or should we take the opportunity, and the risk, of having the uncomfortable conversations.

Is the promotion of minority rights, poverty rights and fighting climate change, and all the restrictions on our behaviour that they bring with them, a real threat to the freedoms that many believe are the foundation of our economy and lifestyle.

The provincial election may or may not turn interesting over the next two weeks, but it certainly will not address the rift that has been revealed in our society.

That will take much more time, and patience from all of us.