Shut Up And Listen 130 The Race To Queen’s Park Week Two: The Liberals I don’t like the Liberal Party. I really don’t. I see them as the lowest of the low. They are in the middle ground. They are the politician’s party, in my mind. They aren’t left-wing, they aren’t right-wing. They fall dead centre, whatever the centre is that day. They are, at least from my perspective, without a set of beliefs. They sit right in the middle of it all and say whatever they can to get elected. You don’t know what you’re going to get from them. For all the bad things I say about parties like the Progressive Conservatives or the Alliance, at least I know what I’m getting with them. They have a set of beliefs or morals or standards or whatever you want to call them. The Liberals don’t. And that’s where my distrust of them arises. Now, I know, it is hard to just go to one side and not the other these days. People like to mix-and-match ideas from both sides of the political spectrum. And that’s why the Liberals have been rather dominant in the federal arena recently. The Liberals do have the flexibility to play mix-and-match, which does make some sense when you really think about it. But it also makes them very hard to pin down. Because there is no true set of beliefs for Liberals, there also isn’t anything one could call an example of the Liberal Party. Every Liberal is different. There is no sense of what a Liberal really is amongst them. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do find it problematic in an area of life where things like beliefs and ideologies are quite prevalent. The Liberals allow politicians who only care about winning to have a nice little home full of more people like them. The Ontario Liberals, honestly, strike me as a bit of a joke. No withstanding my general distrust and dislike of the party itself, the Ontario Liberals specifically make me laugh because I can’t take them seriously. They strike me as a pack of losers. In the past three federal elections, the Liberals have mainly gained power by taking Ontario. In the last election, they got something like 102 out of the 104 seats available in Ontario. On a federal level, the Liberals dominate Ontario. On a provincial level, they’ve gotten their asses handed to them in the past two elections by the Tories (PC). We’re talking about elections that overlapped with periods where the Liberals dominated federally. Essentially, the problem wasn’t the Liberals in and of themselves, but these Liberals. Which leads me to the current leader of the Ontario Liberals, Dalton McGuinty. I don’t like this guy. He seems to me to personify the politician. He has a politician’s haircut. He wears a politician suit. He talks like a politician. And for all my love of politics, I don’t like straight-up politicians. I also think that it’s amazing they’ve stuck with him through the past couple of defeats, because I’ll tell you something: it’s his fault the Liberals lost the past two times if he was leader. If his party is dominating his province in federal elections and not provincial ones, it’s obvious it’s his fault. From what I’ve seen and read, the Liberals do have some good ideas and plans in some areas. But they don’t strike me as all that strong or backed up with thought. Like they talk a lot about smaller class sizes in schools, but never really say how they’ll do it. They seem to be attempting to say all the things people want to hear with the hopes that no one will ever go “Yeah, but how?” There’s only real way I could see myself voting for the Liberals in the upcoming election and that would be if I knew for certain that my vote would prevent a member of the PC from getting elected in my riding. Because despite my problems with the Liberals, they are the lesser of two evils when it comes to them and the Tories. And that seems to be how they’re marketing themselves, which may be the real reason why they’ll most likely take this election. Next week: a nice look at the New Democrat Party