Last Updated on: 8th June 2018, 02:21 pm
Well, all things election are in the bag, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the way things turned out. The Liberals won another majority including gaining 4 more seats, Liz Sandals won Guelph, and in the most interesting turn of events, John Tory won nothing, losing the race in his riding to Liberal Kathleen Wynne which could make the next little while extremely interesting to watch.
To all of the people complaining about how nothing changed and how we’ve stuck with the status quo, all I can say is wait and see. I think you’ll get your change, just not right away and perhaps not in the ways you had expected/hoped for. Tory said last night that he plans to stay on as PC Leader, but we’ll see how long that lasts. The Conservatives aren’t the Green Party, and I’m not sure how long a leader with no seat will be considered the right person for the job, especially when he managed to take the party from a possible position of power in a minority government to an even bigger majority for his closest competition and a gain in support for both the Greens and the NDP. And speaking of the NDP, Howard Hampton is apparently hinting that he might not stay on as leader much longer even though his party made gains in the popular vote over 2003. So change is probably coming, it’s just a question of when and for who.
As I figured, the referendum on changing our electoral system didn’t come close to passing. The CBC is reporting that only about 37% of voters were in favour of the idea, far from the 60% it needed to become the law of the land. My prediction was 30% with 35 being the absolute max, so I’m a little surprised. I’m not sure if the question will ever come up again, but if it does I hope that more thought is put into educating the voters than was this time. Nobody understood the thing, and that’s unacceptable when the future of the province rides on what those people say. I spent a decent part of my long weekend trying to explain to people how it worked, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. The way it seemingly came out of nowhere makes it appear that it was doomed to failure from the start, and that’s sad. No matter how you felt about it, any time a decision is put to the voters it should be given a fair chance and we should be given a fair chance to figure out what it is we’re deciding and how we feel about it. Anything else is robbery funded with our money.
I don’t know what turnout was like at the polls, but hopefully it winds up better than 57%, which is an absolutely ridiculous number. If you voted, good for you, and if you didn’t, I hope you’ve got a good excuse, like a coma or a long stay out of the province. We’re given plenty of chances to voice our opinions around here, and we need to take advantage of them if we want a change or even if we want nothing more than to be able to complain later on. With the world in the state it’s in currently, the right to vote is not one that can or should be taken for granted. In closing, even though I doubt that many of them are, I hope that all of the people who didn’t make it to the polls out of apathy or laziness are as ashamed of themselves as I am of them, because they should be.