Kathleen Wynne's government went into the Ontario election hobbled by a massive deficit and spending scandals involving cancelled gas plants and air ambulance services, but managed to eke out a majority, even as polls suggested they were headed for a minority.
It appears Wynne defied the pundits by successfully promising change to voters – even while representing a party that has held power for more than 10 years.
University of Windsor political scientist Cheryl Collier says she believes Wynne emerged with a victory because she was able to disassociate herself from the problems that plagued the government of her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty.
"I think most people did not tag Kathleeen Wynne with those scandals," she told CTV Windsor. "She was able to distance herself from it just enough that people were able to say we’re going to give her a chance to govern."
Collier added that voters likely also liked what they saw from Wynne during her year in power. They may have been attracted to the way she approached government and liked what her budget promised.
Dennis Pilon, an associate political science professor at Toronto's York University, points out though that the Liberals did not increase their share of the popular vote by much, even though they earned four more seats than needed to form a majority. The Liberals moved from 37 to 38 per cent of the popular vote, while the Tories grabbed 31 per cent of the vote and the NDP 24 per cent.
"It isn't really that amazing a victory when we start to drill down into the numbers," Pilon told CTV News Channel.
"They improved their popular vote by only about one per cent. So we're still talking about a distinct minority of Ontarians endorsing the Liberals. That's hardly a mandate."
CTV’s political analyst Scott Reid says Wynne managed to show over the 41-day campaign that she was the best political candidate, despite a rather inferior performance during the leaders' debate. But her win may be less an endorsement of her than a rejection of her rivals, he suggested.
"At the end of the day, Ontarians decided 'We'd rather grow than cut our way to a stronger economic way forward.' This was fundamentally a clash of economic prescriptions and she won and (outgoing Progressive Conservative Leader Tim) Hudak lost," he told CTV's Canada AM.
There's an old adage that governments defeat themselves – particularly ones that have been in office for 11 years, Reid said. So it was an "unusual choice," he said, for Hudak's party to mount a campaign that was less about tearing down the Liberals and more about Hudak himself and his plan for spending cuts.
"Within the bounds of his strategy, he ran a fairly effective campaign; he just picked the wrong strategy," Reid said.
Collier believes Hudak's campaign made a number of miscalculations, most notably the plan for cutting 100,000 jobs to reduce spending.
"I think a lot of people had trouble making that work in their minds; it logically didn't make sense," she said.
Reid agreed.
"The economic mindset of the province is that's very fragile, and I think that in many ways helps to explain this outcome: People didn't want to take a risk on one extreme or another and that's how they ended up interpreting Hudak's plan."
