LILLEY: Strange days as Ontario election campaign winds down
We are hitting the silly season for Ontario's election as the NDP and Liberals battle for second place
Article content
Doug Ford now has the support of 13 different unions in this election, and apparently the support via donations of several Liberal candidates.
Meanwhile, an NDP candidate dropped out after a weird video surfaced of her wishing she was a black woman, and Bonnie Crombie can’t stop talking about Doug Ford’s balls.
tap here to see other videos from our team.
LILLEY: Strange days as Ontario election campaign winds down Back to video
tap here to see other videos from our team.
It’s an odd time in Ontario politics just one week out from voting day.
Ford started his day Thursday being endorsed by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. This is a union that until very recently was closely tied to the Liberals – they were tight with former leader Steven Del Duca, but now they are backing Ford instead of Bonnie Crombie’s Liberals.
An hour later, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 128, which represents all of Ontario, was backing Ford. There was a time when this union would never have backed the PCs and now, for the second election in a row, they are putting their support behind Ford.
The union that represents workers in industrial construction – with an emphasis on electricity plants – pointed to Ford’s backing of refurbishing and rebuilding the province’s electrical generation system as a reason for their decision.
Many of these unions – most of them construction trade unions, but also including the Ontario Professional Fire Fighters Association and various police unions – would have previously backed the NDP or perhaps the Liberals. Now, with the NDP in particular, but too often the Liberals as well, opposing the types of projects that these unions and their members build, allegiances have shifted.
It may sound cliched, but today’s NDP cares more about the faculty club at the local university than about the members at the local union hall.
It’s not just unions supporting Doug Ford though, it’s also some Liberal candidates as the NDP pointed out Thursday morning. The NDP have released a list of 10 different Ontario Liberal candidates who have donated to either the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party or the federal Conservative Party.
Not all of the donations could immediately be confirmed as being Liberal candidates but many clearly were.
Some of the donations go back many years, others are last year. The grand total, more than $20,000 in donations to conservative political parties from people now running for Bonnie Crombie, the leader now asking NDP voters to back her for her campaign to cut taxes and bring in a centre-right government.
The NDP had their own problems on Thursday after Dr. Amanda Zavitz, a sociology professor and executive director of the Gender Equality Coalition of Ontario, stepped down as the party’s candidate in Elgin-Middlesex-London.
“My secret is that I want to be a black woman,” the very white Zavitz said during an online seminar in 2022.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
tap here to see other videos from our team.
The self-described feminist and Marxist went on to say that she wanted to be “an expert in inequality with lived experiences of poverty and living in addiction and alcoholism,” implying this is something she would understand if she were a black woman. The entire rant by Zavitz is ludicrous but also par for the course for the lunatic fringe of identity politics that has taken over part of the progressive movement.
While the NDP lost a candidate, Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals are refusing to ditch any problematic candidates, which is leading to Crombie spending too much time talking about Doug Ford’s genitalia.
“If Doug Ford has something to say to me, he should have the balls to say it to my face,” Crombie said Wednesday in the suburbs of Ottawa.
She had just been asked about her candidate in Ottawa Centre, Thomas Simpson, after a social media post from 2012 saying “Consent is not sexy.” It’s an old tweet, but Crombie’s response was an odd one.
She’s had candidates exposed for defending Bill Cosby, Gian Gomeshi, saying consent isn’t sexy, making racially insensitive remarks, making fun of women. Some of these remarks are clearly jokes, some of them really bad jokes, but Crombie’s response about Ford not having “the balls” to say this to her face is odd.
Does she expect him to drop by her house every time he finds a Liberal candidate saying something stupid?
The bottom line, we are a week away from the election, and we are in a silly season as the NDP and Liberals battle for second place. We have no doubt who the winner will be next Thursday.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.