From criminal to political, what next for Ontario?

An OPP probe into a possible Queen’s Park coverup is having a domino effect:

The Ontario Provincial Police is investigating a possible coverup in the premier’s office under Dalton McGuinty.

His successor, Kathleen Wynne, is suffering collateral political damage.

Now, Wynne’s rival for the premier’s job, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, is under the spotlight. Not, in fairness, for any alleged crimes — for it goes without saying that Horwath isn’t under police investigation. But scandals, and scandal mongering, have a way of boomeranging.

All three party leaders must be mindful of how they play their cards, lest they overplay their hands over the controversial cancellation of two gas-fired power plants.

Horwath indulged in conventional opposition mischief by implying police were “now focusing on questions about the period after you were sworn in and became premier” — a clear misreading of the OPP documents. But the NDP leader also found herself targeted by her chief opposition rival, Tory Leader Tim Hudak.

In a double-barrelled attack after the OPP revelations, Hudak not only went after Wynne but directly accused Horwath of exacerbating the biggest scandal in Ontario history: Not criminally culpable but politically complicit.

Hudak’s strategy is to link Horwath to Wynne, just as he is lumping Wynne in with McGuinty — like a game of dominoes, where one piece knocks out the next: Use the McGuinty explosion to make Wynne radioactive while also contaminating Horwath.

Hudak didn’t miss a beat, describing the OPP documents as evidence that “this is now clearly more of Kathleen Wynne’s scandal than Dalton McGuinty’s.”

The OPP documents suggest no such thing, but Hudak used that false premise about Wynne as a building block for a bigger proposition about Horwath: “She clearly cannot continue to stand and prop up a corrupt government,” he thundered.

He makes a good point about Horwath’s hypocrisy. By putting Wynne under the gun, Horwath has placed herself in the spotlight — by her own logic, acting as a Liberal enabler makes her an accessory to scandal.

Ever since McGuinty lost his majority in the 2011 election, the NDP has walked a fine line between pummelling the Liberals and propping them up. For the first two years, while the Tories flailed from the sidelines, it made sense for the New Democrats to wield the balance of power:

Why forego their leverage to extract progressive concessions out of the government — from a freeze on corporate tax reductions to a surtax on high incomes and lower auto insurance rates? Organized labour pressured the NDP to keep the Liberals in power, because it benefited from a progressive alliance between the two parties against Hudak’s anti-union Tories.

With the passage of time, most of those arguments have faded. The Liberals have signalled they are less likely to adopt a laundry list of NDP demands for which Horwath can claim credit. And the whiff of scandal is fresh again.

If Horwath truly believes, as she now claims, that there are unanswered questions about Wynne’s government emanating from the police probe, she also knows it would take many months for the details to emerge. How then could she let a spring budget pass — her last chance to defeat the government for perhaps another year?

By buying into Hudak’s baiting, Horwath has seemingly fallen into his trap. If Wynne can effectively make the case that they are smearing her, when they should be targeting McGuinty, the dynamics could change.

Either way, the NDP may have its own good reasons for triggering an election sooner rather than later, and the latest scandal-mongering may be a mere pretext. The latest public opinion polls — prior to the OPP revelations, but after years of controversy — show the Liberals in the lead, with Wynne deemed best-suited to be premier. Ontario voters could be suffering from gas-plant fatigue, or they may blame McGuinty, not Wynne, for cost overruns and cover-ups.

The polls consistently show the NDP running third, with Horwath’s high approval ratings slowly sliding and Wynne on the rise. The economy is also rebounding thanks to an American recovery projected for the months ahead. With the Canadian currency falling, exports are rising and job creation is improving.

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The latest whiff of scandal certainly boosts the odds of a spring election. But the NDP’s underlying political and economic calculations may be a more powerful motivation for triggering the government’s downfall.

The longer Horwath waits, the more she has to lose.

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