The campaign slogan of the Ontario PC leader, Doug Ford, is “protecting ontarium”, but during the debate of leaders from all over the province on Monday night, it seemed to change it to “protect my leadership.”
Ford played it safe during the 90 minutes of televised debate, and played it even safer after the transmission jumping the programmed conferences of post -debate news.
That is the second consecutive time, Ford has refused to participate in a Q and after the debate, since he did the same on Friday after the north debate. This means that Ford has now gone more than a week without taking any questions from journalists on the ground of Ontario, I give in the middle of an electoral campaign that lasts only four weeks.
Everything is part of a very clear Ford strategy that was also displayed during the debate: to stick to his campaign message determined to protect Ontario from the threat of tariffs and spend the shortest possible time talking about anything else.
Among Ford’s rivals, liberal leader Bonnie Crombie was the most aggressive to try to get him out of his conversation points.
The debate format gave each leader the opportunity to go to one for two minutes, and Crombie began his segment with Ford with an explosion.
The liberal leader of Ontario, Bonnie Crombie, faced the leader of the PC, Doug Ford, questioning his reliability.
“Doug, I have a question for you and a single question,” said Crombie, when he appeared on a screen divided with Ford. “After seven years of lies, why should someone trust a word that says?”
Crombie, who spent part of his childhood living in a room house, increased his attack against Ford near the end of the debate with a comment about him was born in wealth.
‘Silver spoon in your mouth’
“You don’t get the difficult situation of real people because you were raised privileged, with a silver spoon in the mouth,” Crombie said. “You didn’t have to work at all. They gave you a company, Doug, so you don’t understand how faces things are today. I bet you couldn’t tell me what the cost of eggs is.”
If Ford did not know the price of eggs before the debate, he guaranteed that his managers will tell him for the next time in front of journalists.
Crombie is trying to move the person “for people” that Ford has successfully portrayed during his time in politics. That is a fairly difficult task.
Larkssa Waler, former director of Ford communications, says that liberal and NDP messages have generally failed in Ford because she has been attacking a version of him that she says does not exist.
The four leaders of the Ontario party faced face to face in the final debate against the provincial elections. Look at the most prominent aspects.
“You can’t convince everyday voters that Doug Ford doesn’t care, because it really does,” Waler said in a recent interview.
When the NDP Marit Stiles leader had his two -minute opportunity to go one with Ford, in contrast to Crombie, he spent almost 45 seconds in preamble, before addressing it in funds by students in the school system.
‘Class sizes are huge’
Around the end of that two -minute exchange, Stiles challenged Ford’s JACT to hire more teachers.
“Parents with children in our schools at this time, they know that this is not true. Class sizes are huge,” Stiles said. “Actually, it has reduced financing by $ 1,500 per student.”
The NDP issued a press release declaring Stiles as the winner of the debate. Although he found himself so comfortable and warm on the screen, it is a great challenge to find moments in which Stiles said something particularly blunt and memorable.
Stiles dropped a mini bombardment against Crombie, claiming that the liberals received $ 25,000 in political donations of what she called “private medical care experts.”
When more details were asked, an NDP official provided a list of 11 liberal donors, including executives of companies involved in long -term households, medical laboratories and medical care services.
The leader of the Ontario PND, Marit Stiles, says he was surprised to discover the liberal leader Bonnie Crombie and his party received $ 25,000 in donations from private medical care organizations.
CROMBIE PITCHS TO THE PEN voters
It is not difficult to say that Stiles and Crombie faced the most difficult tasks of the four leaders.
As novice leaders of their matches, in their first televised debate throughout the province, with more ontarium voters watching them at any time since they assumed their work, the bets were quite high for both.
They needed to achieve the right balance between talking about their own policies, persecuting Ford for history and chasing each other in their effort to position themselves as the best alternative to PCs.
Crombie made a shameless launch for PND supporters in his final statement. “I ask those of you who voted for the NDP in the last elections that vote liberals, who vote for a government that fixes our medical care system and getting a family doctor,” he said.
The aggressive Crombie approach for Ford, and its direct courtship of the PND voters, could change the dynamics in the campaign, maybe not enough to influence who wins the elections, but perhaps enough to determine who is Second and form the official opposition.
The fourth leader on stage, Mike Schreiner, of the Green Party, achieved what he simply needed to be there.
He focused on articulating his party’s policies, and if it was not a convincing viral moment, he helped increase his profile in his efforts to add another green seat or two in Queen’s Park.
The debate went beyond rates
The debate format and the questions aimed to expand the discussion beyond tariffs on other key issues that import for provincial voters, including medical care, affordability, public safety, education and climate change. (Complete dissemination: I was part of the editorial team that developed the structure, chose the themes and wrote the questions).
The segment in which each party leader was forced to defend a specific campaign promise, and then explain the holes on their platforms, generated some of the most revealing answers of the night.
- Ford refused to address the price of what is possibly the most expensive campaign promise ever made by a leader of the Ontario party: build a tunnel under 401.
- Crombie danced around the fact that his middle -class tax cut does not help anyone who wins less than $ 50,000 per year.
- Stiles offered little about details about the treatment of the addiction crisis.
- Schreiner was called for leaving his long lasting promise to eliminate Catholic school boards.
We will know if the debate had an impact on voters once the results arrive at the night of the elections next Thursday.
