Anti-elite Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford has won a landslide victory against the Canadian political establishment beating back the former ruling Liberal Party which have been reduced to so few seats they have lost official party status.
Ford and the Progressive Conservatives (PC) won a total of 76 out of 124 seats in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario Thursday forming the first PC majority government in the province since 2003.
The former ruling Liberal Party under leader Kathleen Wynne, a staunch ally of federal Liberal party leader and current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, saw a catastrophic collapse at the polls going from 55 out of 101 seats to a mere seven seats which disqualifies them for official party status in the assembly.
The loss is considerable for the Liberals, according to University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman who said: “They don’t get money for research, at the legislature. They don’t get representation on legislative committees. It means that they don’t get recognised during question period as a party, which means they’ll have a hard time raising questions.”
Many voters in Ontario railed against Wynne and the Liberals over a number of issues including the promotion of extreme social justice policies such as threatening to remove children from parents who do not accept their gender identity to substantial hydro bills, and reckless spending that made Ontario one of the most indebted governments in North America.
The defeat also represents a significant loss for Wynne’s long-time ally Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who has been at odds with U.S. President Donald Trump in recent weeks over trade issues and tariffs which Trudeau called “insulting” ahead of this week’s G7 summit in Quebec.
Seen as the closest thing to a Canadian Trump by many observers, Doug Ford, brother of the late former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, ran a campaign focused on standing up to the political establishment and the elites after winning the leadership of the PCs back in March of this year.
Justin Trudeau Approval Rating Now Below President Trump as Right Wing Parties Surge In Canada https://t.co/KT9620X9md
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 20, 2018
In an interview following his leadership win, Ford outlined what he meant by campaigning against the elites saying: “I just feel the grassroots people haven’t had a voice. And the elites are in all three parties. Let me describe the elites: it has nothing to do with money. Because I know people worth half-a-billion, a billion dollars that grab a shovel and start digging a ditch.”
“The elites, they think they’re smarter than you; they look down at you they think you’re some sort of neanderthal, that they know better. And they want to breathe their ideology onto the city or community or wherever you live. They stick their nose up at you and when they drink their glass of wine they have their little pinky in the air,” he added.
Following his landslide victory, Ford gave a speech to supporters in Etobicoke thanking his late brother Rob and promising “an era of economic prosperity, the likes of which this province has never seen before. Prosperity that will benefit every resident of Ontario, and tonight we have sent a clear message to the world: Ontario is open for business.”
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