| Apr 09, 2014


Editorial by Jeff Green


Among other things, the Quebec election demonstrated that a poor campaign by one party can shorten the attention span of the electorate.

The massive corruption scandal that forced the retirement of Jean Charest and sent the Quebec Liberals into the penalty box of the opposition benches has been lifted after only 19 months.

This happened even though a commission of inquiry has been dishing out revelation after revelation about kick- backs and other payments of all kinds to operatives connected to the Quebec Liberal Party over many years.

How did this happen?

The Parti Quebecois allowed the focus of the election to stray from the corruption scandals that would have secured their election, to talk about a referendum on sovereignty, and voilà, they received the lowest level of support since the first election the party ever contested in 1970.

Meanwhile in Ontario, Premier Kathleen Wynne must be thinking that if the Quebec Liberals could somehow create a case of collective amnesia about the recent past, why can't she?

Tim Hudak has one huge advantage in the coming campaign. The Liberal government that Kathleen Wynne inherited laid waste to over $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to buy two seats in the last election, and then in a move of staggering cynicism, Dalton McGuinty delivered a two-minute speech in which he not only quit the premiership but shut down the legislature for over six months. His party was willing to sacrifice the needs of the province in favour of a hasty retreat from public life for an embattled premier.

Hudak needs to hammer this fact home during the coming campaign. It is in this context that when police investigating the gas plant scandal revealed a couple of weeks ago that some hard drives in the premier's office at Queen's Park were wiped of information just before Wynne came into office, he pounced.

In a press conference on the day of the revelations he said that Kathleen Wynne “oversaw and possibly ordered the criminal destruction of documents to cover up the gas plant scandal. I mean, what more do you need than to change government?”

The problem for Hudak is that he has not produced any evidence for his claim about Kathleen Wynne's involvement, and she has called his bluff by suing him.

This has put him in a difficult position. If he retracts his statement he will have a hard time making the gas plant scandal an election issue.

If he does not back down, Kathleen Wynne will proceed with a lawsuit as quickly and publicly as she can.

If the talk of the campaign is the lawsuit and not the gas plant scandal, Hudak may be forced to start talking about something else during the campaign, and he doesn't want to do that. For him, the ballot box question should be the integrity of the Ontario Liberals. The electorate needs to be thinking about Kathleen Wynn's role in the McGuinty government or else Hudak is in trouble.

When McGuinty resigned in October 2012 I wrote that no matter how long the Liberals delayed before coming out of the shadows and facing the voters in an election, they would be tossed out of office.

Partly because of Kathleen Wynne's impressive ability to control the public agenda during her first year in office, and partly because of Tim Hudak's miscalculations, but also because these days everything becomes ancient history in the blink of an eye, I'm not so sure anymore.

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