PC party holds the Milton seat - low voter turnout was disappointing. Ford threw everything he had into the campaign.

By Ray Rivers

May 4^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

OPINION

Zee Hamid, Progressive Conservative candidate on the election campaign trial. He won.

Conservative Zee Hamid handily beat out his Liberal opponent to win the right to represent the people of Milton at Queen’s Park in the May 2nd by-election.  Little more that a quarter of the eligible voters bothered to come out for the vote, despite it being a lovely sunny and warm day.  That is a sad testimony on the state of our democracy, no matter how you spin it.

Milton has grown by leaps and bounds over the decades since its mayor pushed regional council to introduce the ‘big pipe’.  Pipes actually, one to bring fresh water from Lake Ontario and the other to return that water as sewage back to a lake where safe fish consumption is already severely limited.

Premier Ford, Milton Mayor Gord Krantz and candidate Zee Hamid

Mayor Krantz, much like Ontario’s premier, is apparently in love with a 1960’s urban sprawl model of development.  As its ‘eternal’ mayor, he has stacked the once charming farm community of Milton to overflowing with wall-to-wall housing and warehousing, destroying countless acres of quality farm and natural habitat, and saddling its rural residents with the high costs of maintaining sprawl development.  One has to wonder why Milton was overlooked for inclusion as part of the provincial green belt in the first place.

Zee Hamid wasn’t always a Tory, having switched his colours for this election.  He tried, unsuccessfully, for the federal Liberal nomination back in 2015 and had been a Liberal party donor up until fairly recently.   Still, his record as a town councillor should help prepare him for his new role as MPP.  And a good part of that record had been to promote exactly the kind of sprawl development over which his new party leader salivates.   In which case Mr. Hamid is finally home.

Bonnie Crombie: Leader Ontario Liberal Party: She decided Milton was not winnable – and a win was vital.

This was the first provincial by-election since Bonnie Crombie won leadership of the provincial Liberals last December.  There was an expectation that the new leader, who resides a stone’s throw away in Mississauga, would take advantage of the opportunity to win a seat and present herself where it matters most – at Queen’s Park.  That she walked away, some would say chickened out, has to be a huge blow to the people who trusted her with their vote for leadership.

I had been a strong critic of Mr. Ford even before he stole the Tory nomination in what can only be described as a smelly right-wing coup on the eve of the 2018 election.  At the time I wrote that Ford was ill equipped to lead a modern progressive province which Ontario had become since the turbulent days of Mike Harris.  And he has done little to make me want to alter that sentiment.

But clearly there are a lot of people who feel differently about Ford and what the Progressive Conservative tribe he leads stands for.   Somehow the entire Greenbelt fiasco, which was a disgraceful episode regardless whether the RCMP presses criminal charges, has been forgotten.  The voting public showed up – or failed to show up – and rewarded the premier with another feather in his hat.  There was also another by-election win in the Tory safe seat of Lambton-Kent-Middlesex to help boost the premier’s confidence and convince him that he is on the right track.

The Greenbelt fiasco and an ongoing RCMP investigation didn’t appear to matter to the voters that did show up for the btelection.

There was a time when even a hint of wrong doing spelled the end to a politician’s career.  But today one can look south of the border to where a former president has been indicted on numerous criminal charges.  And yet, incredibly, that has only enhanced the public’s affection for him.  Perhaps Mr. Ford’s apparent fondness for breaking the rules helps explain this phenomenon which seems to result in his own popularity.

Particularly interesting is how the younger voters in the US have shifted their support from the person who claims to have done so much for them.  Biden paid off a huge amount of university student debt and his policies have expanded the US labour force and reduced unemployment.   Strangely the preference among the beneficiaries has been to throw their support to someone who opposed all of that and who is threatening to erode their democratic rights.

Social media is not capable of providing the depth needed to fully understand the changes taking place. For some reason society is limiting its sources of information at a time when credible sources are what is needed most.

Of course this younger generation generally shun TV news and won’t read newspapers to get their information.  They prefer to tune in daily to unedited, virtually uncontrolled social media platforms – a grown up version of “kids say the funniest things” to get their daily dose of what is going on.  At least the US has promised to ban Chinese controlled Tik Tok.  The current large scale protests over Gaza have been traced directly to the vast amount of misinformation appearing daily on Tik Tok and other social media.

The Trudeau government also has been trying to do something to improve the quality of the content on online platforms and social media generally.  It has introduced a number of laws, C-10/11 amending the Broadcast Act; C-18 The Online News Act; and C-63 The Online Harms Act.  Governing media is a delicate rope walk and, of course the official opposition has generally opposed all of these new rules – at least until, and if, they form government.

There will be more opportunity to air those concerns as the clock ticks down to the next provincial election in 2026 and an even earlier federal election slated for October 2025.   But the right thing to do after a by-election is congratulate the winner and hope that the trust of those who voted for Mr. Hamid will be  truly earned.

Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.   Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa.  Tweet @rayzrivers

Background links:

Big Pipe –    By-election –      Urban Sprawl –     Tik Tok