Does the Ontario Liberal victory sound the death knell for the far right?

On October 2 Canada's largest - by population - and arguably most politically significant province ended two terms of Tory rule and elected the provincial Liberals to lead their government. The victory was unprecedented in its scope with the Liberals snagging seventy-two of one hundred and three seats, while the incumbent Progressive Conservatives captured just twenty-four ridings, a greater majority than that which originally brought Mike Harris' Tories roaring into office in 1995.

Dalton McGuinty led his second provincial election campaign after being soundly trounced himself in the 1999 election to become Ontario's 24th Premier. On the surface it is easy to dismiss this type of large-scale government turnover as typical provincial political theatre of the absurd. But the scope of the Tories' defeat must be indicative of at least some dissatisfaction with the extreme right turn taken by the province over the past eight years.

Playwright Albert Camus once said "every revolutionary ends up becoming either an oppressor or a heretic." The purveyors of Ontario's "Common Sense Revolution," the theme espoused by Harris and his successor, defeated Premier Ernie Eves, have increasingly been portrayed as the oppressors of the common good Camus refers to.

In the polarizing world of provincial politics it is perhaps not surprising that Harris' hard right conservative movement engaged in virtual warfare with those outside the Tory sphere of influence, particularly teachers, health care workers and other public sector unions.

From the moment they were sworn in at Queen's Park in Toronto, the Conservatives made it well known that the status quo was no longer acceptable. Contracts were imposed, new regulations and labor laws were enacted and taxes cut in efforts to stimulate the perceived lagging economy of the nation's most industrial province.

The voters, the theory went, were on board. Two election victories should demonstrate that the public is no longer willing to accept the center or center-left leaning governments of old.

Indeed, the success of the right-leaning fiscal policies of then Finance Minister and soon to be Prime Minister Paul Martin were echoes of the same conservative voice. In British Columbia in 2001 the enormous victory of the 'too-far-right-to-be-liberal' Liberal party only confirmed the political direction the people of Canada wished to travel.

But a closer look at some of these elections may not support the notion that Canadians are suddenly embracers of 'Reaganomic' principles.

Though Ontario has a long history of electing Progressive Conservative governments, virtually all of those pre-Harris Tory provincial regimes leaned much heavier on the first part of their name than the latter. And like more right-leaning governments elected in other parts of the country, very often the elected parties did not so much win the election as their opponents lost.

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