Steven Del Duca's visibility problem could be a curse and blessing for Ontario Liberals

Nationalpost.com
May 16, 2022

On March 7, 2020, Ontario’s 23rd case of COVID had just been found in a Peel Region man who had been on a cruise ship, the Grand Princess, then off the coast of California. The government was scrambling to get hundreds of other Canadians off that boat and others. Things were getting real; the first shutdowns began a week later.

But on that Saturday, Ontario Liberals gathered in a Mississauga convention centre to vote on what already seemed a foregone conclusion. As a result of this impossibly bad timing, Steven Del Duca, who became party leader on the first ballot that afternoon, today has a visibility problem.

That is the political legacy of the pandemic for him. It stunted his ability to reach out to voters, but it also set him aside, out of sight and out of mind in an electoral curse that could, if all goes according to Liberal hopes, serve also as a blessing.

When he launched his campaign this month, Ontarians were meeting him as if for the first time. Not literally, but it seemed that way in comparison to Andrea Horwath, who is fighting her sixth campaign for the NDP and fourth as leader, and Premier Doug Ford, whom Ontario has known since his brother Rob was mayor of Toronto.

The pandemic illuminated Ford’s political character, but it cast Del Duca in shadow, and few people squinted hard enough to make him out.

Del Duca might benefit from this blank slate factor in a race against a vulnerable incumbent. Some of the things he is known for, politically, are for him best forgotten, politically. For many people they are indeed forgotten, including most of his baggage from his time as a cabinet minister, and the fact that right out of the gate as leader he had a personal entitlement problem.

He had built a pool in his backyard at the end of a street in Vaughan that backs on to protected land of the Humber River watershed, and although he needed permits and variances to excavate so close to parkland, he did not have them.

He called it an “honest mistake” and eventually sorted it out with the local government, but the ruling PCs still had a ball with it, handing out beach balls to mark his election as party leader with a “pool party.”

It was one of those scandals that threatens to be interesting before collapsing in a mess of technicalities, partisan sniping, reasonable contrition and a whole lot of who cares. That is one of the problems with Del Duca. Even when caught out in dodgy business, he is not a big motivator.

Say what you will about Doug Ford, he gets people talking and voting. He has mastered backyard politics with his annual Ford Fest parties. Del Duca couldn’t build a pool without looking bad, and acting like the rules do not apply to him. It might not be fair to Del Duca, but in Ontario, this has become a Liberal Party stereotype.

Like many opposition campaigns, this one is as much about the failures of the premier and his government as it is about the aspirations of the rival parties. Del Duca has much official failure to work with, but also eye-catching ideas of his own that are actually catching eyes. More so than Horwath and the NDP, Del Duca seems a plausible alternative to Ford.

He caught attention, for example, for his idea to offer an optional Grade 13, which was phased out a generation ago, and which as a policy proposal seems to hit a promotional sweet spot at the intersection of pandemic recovery, education reform and millennial nostalgia.

He has also pledged to cap class sizes at 20 pupils. He pledged buck-a-ride transit. Before that, he spoke of seniors “stacked up like cord wood” in long term care, and pledged to invest almost $4.5-billion over four years, and end for profit long term care by 2028, including not renewing or granting new licences for profit LTC starting next year.

Del Duca has been an electoral “tortoise” said Andrew Enns, executive vice-president of Leger, a polling firm, slowly bringing his numbers up and now starting to slowly break away from the NDP, creating the necessary gap to make this seem like a two-party race.

It all comes down to his ability to present that plan, that passion, confidence that he could be premier

His “favourables” have gone slowly up, Enns said, but his unfavourables have also tracked up, some of it due to PC advertising, which on the balance is a promising sign for where the incumbent thinks the threat is.

“It all comes down to his ability to present that plan, that passion, confidence that he could be premier,” said Enns. “Voters at some point will give him a look, and there’s always that moment, do they think this guy’s got it?”

Del Duca studied at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, and took a law degree at Osgoode Hall but did not practise law, instead going into politics, including as special assistant to former Premier Dalton McGuinty in Opposition in the late 1990s.

Utilia Amaral is his wife. They have two daughters. His younger brother Michael died in a single-car crash just north of Vaughan on June 21, 2018. He was the passenger. The driver, Konstantinos Kazinakis, also died.

Del Duca described the grief of this in a campaign ad, how every day he feels the “little imperceptible shock that reminds me it actually happened.”

Steven Del Duca is a plaintiff, along with other of Michael’s relations including his widow and children, in a lawsuit against the estate of the driver and a restaurant. It claims more than $5-million for past and future dependency loss. The case involves a complicated arrangement of Michael’s business affairs and is on track to go to trial, following a procedural decision in April.

Steven Del Duca is a former director of public affairs for the carpenter’s union, and stickhandled a newsworthy period in 2008, during the Gaza War, when the union bucked the trend of unions voting to denounce Israeli “apartheid” and instead passed a resolution in support of Israel, drawing praise from Canadian Jewish advocacy groups.

In 2009 he co-chaired a task force to boost voter turnout in Vaughan, where he lives, and where voting was lower than 40% in municipal elections.

Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca campaigns with local candidate Ted Hsu in Kingston.
Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca campaigns with local candidate Ted Hsu in Kingston. PHOTO BY BRIGID GOULEM/POSTMEDIA/FILE
In 2010, he worked with the Toronto Transit Commission and a city councillor on an audit of all 69 subway stations to gauge their condition and usage patterns.

He was co-chair of the Greater Toronto Region Economic Summit. In 2010 he ran for council in Vaughan but lost. In 2011 he tried to pitch a World’s Fair for Toronto by making the “economic case for Expo.” It never happened.

Del Duca served as Liberal riding president in Vaughan, and was tapped to fight the seat in a 2012 by-election, holding it with 51 per cent of the vote for the Liberals after it was vacated by former finance minister Greg Sorbara, for whom he once worked as executive assistant.

In office, Del Duca was parliamentary assistant to Finance Minister Charles Sousa, and in 2013 was party platform co-chair, pursuing a strategy of what was then seen as the hot new trend of “crowd sourcing” policy ideas.

In 2014, he took the hit for the party and apologized for a poster delivered in print in his Vaughan riding and on social media, showing former PC leader Tim Hudak’s face superimposed on the Joker walking away from an exploding hospital in the Batman movie The Dark Knight, which the Tories rather grandly called “terrorist literature.”

The Liberals won the 2014 election, Del Duca won re-election, and the backbencher moved up into the Transportation portfolio, as the public face of a transit expansion plan. There, Del Duca got into trouble for seeming to pressure the regional transit body Metrolinx into approving new train stations, including one for his riding, despite reports that it would be a bad investment.

This sort of thing, electioneering with public money, would become the reason the Liberals got booted from office in 2018, not long after he was shuffled to Economic Development. He fell with all the other ministers.

A few years previously, at the height of his political power to date, Del Duca was instrumental in stopping a proposed highway connecting the suburbs northwest of Toronto through protected land. He has vowed to kill it again, now that the PCs have revived it as a campaign pledge.

For Ontario Liberals, even after exile with a new leader in his first campaign, history is never quite past.