Three out of four Ontarians believe it’s “time for a change” at Queen’s Park because of the unpopular 13 per cent harmonized sales tax and lingering economic fears, a new poll suggests.
The Toronto Star-Angus Reid survey indicates Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, who mark their seventh anniversary in power on Saturday, face major challenges as they head toward the Oct. 6, 2011 election.
With 76 per cent of respondents saying they would like to see another party in power and 71 per cent warning the province “is on the wrong track,” the poll signals change may be on the horizon.
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Jodi Shanoff, senior vice president of Angus Reid Public Opinion, said Ontarians appear to be parking their vote with Hudak, who became Tory leader in June 2009. “They don’t know him, they don’t have much of an opinion of him yet,” …. The key word there is PARKING.
While there is no doubt Hudak Tories would be an improvement (heck Joe Clark would be an improvement) but without a clear mandate we are going to end up with too many CINOs (Conservative RINOs) elected and the emphasis will be on Progressive not Conservative. Hudak needs his feet held to the fire to give us a platform and not expect he can just win this by default. Although the reality is, he can probably do that now because the McGuinty Liberals are such a disaster. How do we get Hudak to avoid a CINO situation?
Maybe if McGuinty were to hang it up or get kicked out and John Manley ran for Liberal Premier, then we’d have real competition; we might get the identification of the major problems with a new leader getting a mandate to fix them. People would know Manley better than Hudak.
Unless Hudak starts to lay out his plans now and use the next year to sell them, he could find himself high and dry against a new Liberal leader. That is a plausible scenario as this article from the Star is warning that Liberal power is eroding yet McGuinty is in denial with “Polls come and polls go” …the premier told the Star Monday. Having heard that denial mindset, the Star is probably now on a mission to crank up the heat to install a replacement for McGuinty and create a game changer.
I don’t have a dog in this fight and I really don’t follow Ontario politics. But for information sake is Hudak a Conservative or a Progressive? Coming from the hyphenated party makes it, for an outsider, hard to tell.