Tim Hudak has used a logical approach to win over voters. Too bad voters aren’t logical

NationalPost.com
June 11, 2014
John Ivison

Antony Niro, an engineer from Vaughan, Ont., was so incensed by the gas plant scandal he asked the Bank of Canada if he could print fake bills and tour them around Ontario to show people what $1-billion looks like when stacked.

On the eve of the provincial election, he has brought his billion dollars to the site of the planned gas plant in Mississauga, a plot of land wedged between a hydro corridor and an industrial estate with not a house in sight.

He’s standing in front of five six foot high piles of fake $100 bills, as heavy machinery works behind him, demolishing the remnants of the plant that was under construction when the Liberal government decided mid-campaign in 2011 that cancelling the project would save the skins of two of their local MPPs.

Mr. Niro says when he started touring with his stack of fake cash, only one in 10 people knew about the gas plant scandal. “Now that’s one in two but that’s still 50% of the population who don’t know what I’m talking about,” he says.

He is surprised the Progressive Conservatives haven’t made more of the issue during the campaign — he says $1-billion would have paid for the hospital Vaughan has been coveting for the last decade.

Yet the gas plants have barely been mentioned by Tim Hudak, the PC leader, who has spent most of the campaign taking the high road.

At Numar Windows factory in Brampton Wednesday, he repeated his standard line that his pitch is about “hope, not spreading fear.”

He berated Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne for saying his plan would hurt children, and her team for running an ad that showed him laughing in front of an exploding hospital. “The Kathleen Wynne I used to know would never have stooped to those tactics to cling to power,” he said. “When you go over the top that much, it’s time to pack it in.”

That’s the reasonable, logical approach. If reason and logic dictate the winner, Mr. Hudak will be crowned premier Thursday night. But voluminous research suggests voters are neither reasonable nor logical.

Jonathan Haidt, the political psychologist author of The Righteous Mind, points out that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade them, you have to appeal to their emotions, he wrote. As 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume once put it, reason is fit only to be the “slave of passion.”

As such, Mr. Hudak may come to rue his high road campaign. Whispers coming from the Liberal camp suggest that Mr. Hudak’s post-debate momentum has stalled and a Grit minority is now the likely outcome. An Ipsos Reid poll late Wednesday said the election will be determined by which party motivates its supporters to get out and vote. But if the Liberals are returned, it would be a boost for the proponents of political hardball.

Ms. Wynne and her allies in the public sector unions have been adept at tapping into a lingering distrust of Mr. Hudak. The Tory leader has not retaliated. “Fear-mongering is the last refuge of the desperate politician. I’m going to appeal to our better instincts,” he said at a rally in Kitchener.

That may turn out to be noble but naïve. Of course the PCs needed to put something in the shop window for voters to buy. But doing so did not preclude Mr. Hudak from holding the Liberals to account for the most cynical and arrogant misuse of public funds since the sponsorship scandal.

In that case, Stephen Harper campaigned on his five point plan, including the GST cut, while demanding a political reckoning for the waste, mismanagement and corruption of the sponsorship debacle.

PC strategists say their research suggests voters don’t see a villain in the gas plant saga – and if they do, it’s not Kathleen Wynne. That’s probably because, until recently, only one in 10 people knew there was a scandal, far less how much it cost.

PC strategists say their research suggests voters don’t see a villain in the gas plant saga – and if they do, it’s not Kathleen Wynne. That’s probably because, until recently, only one in 10 people knew there was a scandal, far less how much it cost.

Mr. Hudak’s team may also worry that their man campaigned against the construction of the gas plants. But, ultimately, it’s the party that made the decision to cancel the project, even as concrete was being poured in Mississauga, that must bear responsibility. The public trust was violated and voters are justified in taking their anger out on the sitting government.

If Mr. Hudak does fall short, the post-mortem will focus on the decision to go light on scandal. Momentum shifted in Mr. Hudak’s favour after the leaders’ debate in which he nailed Ms. Wynne for signing off on the gas plant cancellations as Liberal campaign co-chair in 2011.

Yet, he didn’t show up for the photo op at the gas plant site Wednesday — arguably a more productive use of his time in the last day of the campaign than stops in NDP-held ridings in Kitchener and Niagara Falls.

The sight of the Tory leader fulminating against the backdrop of the fake billion, and the final demolition of the Mississauga site, might have been enough to make more Ontarians the slaves of their passion and ensure they made it to the polls.