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Ford is under no obligation to help them by easing the strain on their finances or organizational challenges. It’s not impossible for a party lacking official status to keep itself in the public eye. The Green Party has spent its entire life trying to do so, with varying rates of success. It’s not clear that Liberals should be given special help while the Greens — who just elected their first-ever member of the provincial legislature — are left to to struggle along on their own. It might do the Liberals some good, in fact, to be forced to reacquaint themselves with the people they aspire the serve.

While they now have seven seats, that could fall to six if Wynne resigns, as other spurned leaders have done. It makes little sense to have guidelines for official recognition if they’re changed every time a party falls below them. There might be concern among Progressive Conservatives that, should they spurn the Liberals now, a future Liberal government might do the same to them. But that’s a mug’s game: even if Ford acts generously now, there’s no guarantee Liberals would do the same if circumstances were reversed. When New Democrats sought Premier Dalton McGuinty’s approval for official status despite falling short of the minimum in 2003, he refused. Though he eventually made some concessions, the NDP had to win its way back to full status.

There was allegedly a time when legislators happily castigated one another by day, then repaired for drinks afterwards in a spirit of camaraderie. It was just business, after all, nothing personal. If that was ever really the case, it’s long since faded. Personal attacks during the latest campaign reached awful levels of vitriol. Campaign ads were astonishingly dishonest in their manipulation of information and sheer invention of “facts.” Blatant inaccuracies were presented as established truths. Throughout their long tenure in government the Liberals used whatever levers they could to hobble the opposition, in particular lavishing resources on public sector unions in return for their assistance at election time. It was the Liberals’ campaign chairman, after all, who launched the party’s re-election bid by describing Ford as “a bit of a dick,” and then offered an extravagantly insincere apology.