Article content continued

He’s so little-known that Liberals struggle to smear him. They’d like to trash him as a hard-right social conservative ex-Harperite who hates immigrants and would impose extremist values on an unsuspecting province, but can’t make it stick. Perhaps that’s because Brown won the nomination by relentlessly courting ethnic Ontarians in towns and cities across the province. In February he easily evaded a Liberal trap, speaking firmly in favour of a motion condemning Islamophobia. “Whether it’s hate against any faith, it’s wrong. I will always stand in opposition to any form of hate. Islamophobia is a problem and we must stand up against it,” he asserted.

He’s even spoiled Liberal hopes of tarring as a knuckle-dragging climate-change denier, pledging party support for a carbon tax, albeit one he says will return the money to Ontarians rather than spending it on new projects as the Liberals plan to do.

The Liberals won the past three elections with a great deal of help from stumbles by their opponents. They are counting heavily on Brown to help them do that again — given their track record, and the deep well of dissatisfaction percolating through the province, it’s almost all they have to cling to. Their success in escaping defeat so often in the past means few prognosticators are willing to write off their abilityto do so again, just as the U.S. press overwhelmingly resisted accepting that Clinton could indeed lose an election to Donald Trump. No one liked Dalton McGuinty much either, and he won three times, right? Maybe Ontarians are just that addle-brained that they’ll continually vote for a government they can’t stand, who knows?

A new book on the Clinton defeat puts her loss down to a monumental sense of hubris within the campaign and a mountain of mistakes and misjudgements that finally caught up to her. Americans, it turned out, had had enough of Hillary Clinton, and wanted someone else. Ontario Liberals don’t want to believe that can happen here. But people are funny, and when they’ve had enough, they’ve had enough.

National Post