It’s a fool’s game, trying to figure out whether a minority government is going to fall and when. Consider reports, all running within a day or two of each other, from the Toronto Star:
The minority Liberal government doesn’t intend to negotiate with the New Democrats in order to get their support for the spring budget, a senior Liberal insider says.
That could set the stage for a provincial election in June and also puts the spotlight on NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, who has seemed far less bullish about joining the eager Tories in pulling the plug on the Liberals’ 10-year-plus reign.
“There will be no negotiating with the New Democrats this time around,” said a veteran Liberal, who spoke to the Star on Sunday on the condition of anonymity.
“They will not design a budget to get the NDP onside … so the chances for an election increase dramatically,” he said.
… and the Toronto Sun (headline: Forget about a spring election in Ontario):
[A]fter much chest-thumping and an obvious attempt to fire up the troops at the Ontario Liberal Party’s annual general meeting, I’m willing to bet that Premier Kathleen Wynne is no more ready to do battle in an election campaign this spring than embattled Mayor Rob Ford is ready to leave the 2014 mayor’s race.
In fact, it’s looking more and more like this spring’s highly-anticipated election may not happen for at least a year, or that Wynne might run out the clock until she absolutely must go to the polls in the fall of 2015.
For further background, the Toronto Star has a story based on ostensible internal Liberal Party polling that shows redshirts stomping the opposition in ridings they might previously have given up for lost, and the Globe and Mail has a story about how the Liberals’ desperate hope is to cling to a minority government if they’re lucky:
The Liberals’ hope now is to win another minority by taking most of the Greater Toronto Area and hanging on to a few seats in Ottawa and other cities. Even this seems to be an uphill battle, which is why the Liberals are trying to persuade the New Democrats not to force an election this spring. But the policies and messaging are aimed at clinging to power if that is unavoidable.
Which is, you’ll note, at odds with the claim from the senior Liberal in the Star’s first story above, saying the New Democrats can go suck eggs.
Being new to covering the provincial government on a daily basis, one doesn’t want to be uppity with people who’ve been doing it for years, but clearly nobody knows anything.
The dynamics here are not, ultimately, that complicated. The Progressive Conservatives are harsh critics of the provincial Liberals and the third-party New Democrats are propping them up. That will last until the New Democrats think an election will either make them the government or possibly the Official Opposition (which no publicly available poll says would happen if a vote were tomorrow), or the Liberals do something so ideologically offensive to them that they feel they have no other choice (which the Liberals aren’t stupid enough to do by accident).
The Liberals will find a way to call an election or manoeuvre their way into one if polls start showing them in majority territory (which no publicly available poll does).
People bring down a government, their own or somebody else’s, when they’re confident they’ll return from an election stronger than they were when they left. They don’t do it for fun or because somebody thinks it’s “time.” The rest is noise and positioning.
