John Tory: Was the Devil you Knew Better than the Devil you Don

John Tory’s by-election defeat last week, and the predictable end of his political career, raise questions about the Ontario Liberal’s political strategy. Believing Tory to be a weak leader, the Liberals could have let him run unopposed, or with token opposition, to return to the Legislature, where the Liberals would kick him around before the 2011 election.

By campaigning hard to defeat him, the Liberals must be thinking that for the Ontario Conservatives, the process of choosing a new leader will be time-consuming and messy, and the likely new leader will be even less electable than Tory. The process will leave the Conservatives divided and leaderless for several months during a period of bleak economic performance. The Liberals expect that the Tories will turn to the right, likely to a younger veteran of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution like Tim Hudak. Or perhaps an older CSR veteran like Jim Flaherty, John Baird, or Tony Clement, will renounce the moderation developed in the context of a recession-fighting federal government, to return to CSR theology in Ontario.

Either way, the Liberals must be salivating at the prospect of the Conservatives executing a turn to the right, which leaves them alone in the political middle for the next election. This will be even more so, if the NDP’s new leader Andrea Horwath moves to the left. Bad economic performance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defeating a government; the opposition parties need credible plans. The Liberals are betting that the majority of voters in the political middle won’t see the hard-left NDP or hard-right Conservatives as credible, thereby making a McGuinty three-peat possible.