Ontario's Tory Ads, Premier Dad, and NDP Fads

In which we try to get excited about a summer of uninspired ads and trying to remember Andrea Horwath's name.

If you were watching the Stanley Cup final last night (and you live in Ontario), you surely would have seen competing ads from Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty and Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak. The Toronto Star's Martin Regg Cohn gives the upper hand to the PC's “Tax Man” spot, which is about as straightforward as you can get – McGuinty likes taxes (the “sneaky eco-tax” line is our favourite). The Liberal ad, in which an unseen McGuinty narrates all that is great about the province, seems a lot more like a popular Chrysler commercial, as many commentators have pointed out. Says Cohn: “With the latest poll showing his popularity has dipped below 20 per cent, it’s hardly surprising that campaign strategists are not putting him front and centre in their advertising.” And we're left wondering if there's any way to get a manufacturer's warranty on what's basically a dependable but dull used vehicle.

Notably absent were any ads from the provincial New Democrats, who have been unable to cash in on their federal counterpart's historic surge, notes Brian MacLeod of QMI Agency. “The reality is, the dynamics of federal politics have rarely spilled over onto the provincial scene,” says MacLeod, bringing up the tried-and-tested point that Ontario elected PC governments for 40 straight years in the latter half of the last century, despite that period being dominated by federal Liberal governments. When you throw in Bob Rae's less-than-stellar premiership, even if it was two decades ago, that's a lot of history that NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and her party have to overcome before the October election.

And heading back to the Star, Bob Hepburn makes the questionable claim that McGuinty has been the province's best premier of the past quarter-century before predicting that Hudak will unseat him at Queen's Park. McGuinty worship aside, Hepburn gives a bleak analysis of the challenges the premier faces for re-election, such as the conservative movement across Ontario that elected Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, vote-splitting on the left, retiring Liberal MPPs, and Hudak's simple anti-tax messaging – a scion of Ford's “stop the gravy train” and Harper's “reckless coalition” slogans. Curiously, Hepburn overlooks the possibility that a broad swath of voters are probably just tired of gentle nagging from Premier Dad for eight years.