TORONTO

So, you may be thinking by now, how can Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals possibly win the next Ontario election in 2018?

After all, it’s not just the three Ontario Provincial Police investigations into her government and its predecessor under Dalton McGuinty, two of which have now produced criminal charges.

It’s the complete and utter incompetence.

Everything the Liberals touch turns into a disaster -- provincial finances, deficits, debt, Ontario’s credit rating, health care, electricity prices, green energy, smart meters, Hydro One, air ambulance services, winter highway maintenance.

You name it, the Liberals have screwed it up, even as their cabinet ministers keep strolling up to the microphones, demanding to be taken seriously on the next Liberal announcement, which will inevitably be the subject of a scathing auditor general’s report, if not a police investigation, a few years down the road.

All that said, there are three simple reasons why Wynne and the Liberals can easily win the next election in 2018.

First, time is on their side.

Second, they have most of the big public sector unions, and many private sector ones, in their pocket.

Third, they have plenty of big business support.

This in return for repeatedly giving business the legislation it wants, for example in car insurance, while handing out billions of dollars in public subsides, for example to Ontario’s disaster-prone green energy industry.

As for the latest blow, two senior staffers to former premier McGuinty facing criminal charges in connection with the deletion of thousands of government e-mails in the gas plant scandal, voters already factored that scandal into the 2014 election and enough voted Liberal to give them a comfortable majority for three more years.

That’s plenty of time to recover from the gas plant debacle, which many Ontarians don’t blame on Wynne anyway, since they voted for her last time.

The second big item propping up the Liberals is the support of big labour.

There are an astounding 1.1 million public sector workers in Ontario -- 10% of the population -- whose wages, pensions and benefits depend, directly or indirectly, on Liberal government largesse.

That’s a powerful voting block who, along with their spouses, children and parents, are not likely to overwhelmingly support any Conservative leader who proposes downsizing the public service -- as we saw in last year’s election -- even though everyone knows we can’t afford the public sector we now have.

In addition, many of the unions representing these 1.1 million workers are in the bag for the Liberals every election and have been since 2003, when they came to power.

Every election, they spend millions of dollars of their members’ dues running attack ads against whoever the Conservative leader is, leaving the Liberals free to focus their campaign war chest on cutesy commercials showing, in the last election, Wynne jogging in the countryside, telling us what leadership is.

(Apparently, leadership is being labelled a homophobe by the premier in you disagree with her sex-ed curriculum, and a racist if you question the wisdom of fellow Liberal Justin Trudeau’s refugee policy.)

Rookie Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown will have to be able to defuse such tactics, or counter them, in the 2018 election.

The province’s Chief Electoral Officer has warned the amount spent on third-party advertising in last year’s election, more than the political parties can spend on their campaigns, created an uneven playing field, with the potential to unduly influence the outcome.

In that election, everyone from the union representing thousands of Ontario journalists to the OPP police union, campaigned against the Conservatives.

The OPP union used the image of a uniformed officer to urge people not to vote for then party leader Tim Hudak, which would have been bad enough even if it hadn’t initially said, wrongly, that this was the political advice of the OPP.

As for the naive idea Wynne’s cap-and-trade plan coming in 2017 will set the Liberals against major industrial greenhouse gas emitters, nothing could be further from reality.

According to documents released by the Liberals about how cap-and-trade will work, they’re planning to give huge public subsidies via free carbon credits -- translation, free money -- to big polluters to keep them happy and on side.

As for the NDP, the Liberals don’t consider them a major threat, the party never having recovered from the debacle of the NDP government of Bob Rae from 1990 to 1995.

Indeed, in the last election Wynne was, bizarrely, successfully able to portray the policies of NDP leader Andrea Horwath as in the same league as former Toronto mayor Rob Ford.

So, can Wynne win in 2018? You bet she can.