As the results began to trickle in shortly after 9 pm, supporters at both candidates' election night parties blamed the result on NDP leader Andrea Horwath, who has faced intense criticism for triggering the election by opposing the Liberal budget, widely considered among the most progressive in recent memory.
At Schein's gathering at Kitch, a trendy bar just north of Dupont and Dufferin, NDP supporter Eoin Harris said Horwath's populist turn had hung Schein and other Toronto New Democrats out to dry. Davenport wasn't the only Toronto riding lost by the NDP, who held five seats in the city going into the night. The Liberals took both Trinity-Spadina and Beaches-East York from the New Democrats, while in Parkdale-High Park NDP incumbent Cheri DiNovo held on by less than 600 votes.
"People were very angry that they didn't pass the budget," Harris said as Motown songs pumped over the sound system and a crowd dotted with bearded and tattooed thirthy-somethings did shots or drank tall cans of beer. "I talked to a lot of people who wanted to vote for Jonah, but wanted to punish the party."
[. . .]
Around the corner at the Casa do Alentejo community centre, dozens of Martins's supporters gathered in a banquet hall decorated with the flags of World Cup countries. The family-friendly crowd included grandparents and bored children playing on smartphones. As they ate from a buffet of Portuguese chicken and rice and watched the election coverage, few had bad things to say about Schein.
"He was great, I really liked him. But unfortunately I couldn't agree with what Andrea did" when she opposed the budget, said Paula Caetano.
Before the election, in the minority parliament, the Liberals had 30 GTA seats, the PCs had 11 and the NDP six.
The GTA helped the Liberals cinch a majority government, adding nine GTA seats to their total while the Tories dropped seven in the region and the NDP shed two.
Doug Holyday, the former Toronto deputy mayor who got the Tories a coveted Toronto toehold in a byelection last year by defeating council mate Peter Milczyn, lost a rematch to his Liberal rival in Etobicoke-Lakeshore.
The Tories’ showing this time was worse than in 2011, when Hudak failed to build on federal Conservative momentum, and the party failed both to break through in Toronto and to win new 905-belt seats that PC strategists had thought winnable.
Holyday’s byelection win last year gave the party reason to rejoice, proclaiming the win a Conservative beachhead in the city. But Thursday’s results saw those hopes vanish.
Shellie Correia lives in West Lincoln, Ont., and volunteered for Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak’s campaign in Niagara West-Glanbrook, saying only he listened to her complaints about wind turbines that affected her son. She says she’s grown to know Hudak and his family, and says that when Hudak tells her a story, she gets the sense that “it’s not just because it’s what you want to hear. He means it.”
But as PC riding after PC riding in Ontario fell on Thursday night, and hope after hope faded, even she was unwilling to make a prediction on the leader’s future with the party.
“I have no idea,” she said, after a long pause, tears staining her face. “We need him to be leading this province and he should. And I have no idea.”
[. . .]
As for the whys and wherefores? Immediately, in Grimsby, the response was a rural-urban divide.
“There are two Ontarios,” said [Mike Sansano, a Grimsby resident]. “They control the GTA, and the rural voice isn’t heard.”
Andrea Horwath is ready to keep fighting for her party's priorities — but is her party prepared to keep her as leader?
Despite increasing the party's popular vote, there are questions about her future as leader of the New Democratic Party after triggering an election that handed Kathleen Wynne's Liberals a majority government.
Despite the NDP gains, Horwath will have less influence in the next session of provincial parliament than she did during the Liberals' two-and-a-half-year minority mandate, during which the Hamilton Centre MPP and her party held the balance of power.
And she has bridges to repair with unions and a group of influential NDP supporters who were critical of her election call and didn't offer their support during the campaign.
None of that came up during Horwath's speech to supporters Thursday, where her focus was carrying on.
Ontario voter turnout, which had fallen steadily for five provincial elections in a row, reversed a generation-long trend yesterday and rose above 50 per cent.
Before last night, turnout in Ontario elections had fallen steadily since Bob Rae’s upset victory in 1990. Five elections in a row saw smaller and smaller turnout, and elections in 2003, 2007 and 2011 each set a new Ontario record for low turnout.
Unofficial results say voter turnout for Ontario’s 2014 elections was 52.1 per cent. That is 3.9 percentage points higher than the 2011 elections, which brought out the lowest voter turnout Ontario has ever seen, with 48.2 per cent.
Low voter turnout in this year’s advance polls led some to predict a fourth record low turnout in this election, but that turned out not to be the case.
The NDP met some setbacks in the 416 area code last night, losing Davenport, Trinity-Spadina and Beaches-East York, barely scraping by in Parkdale-High Park, and losing thousands of votes in stronghold Toronto-Danforth, once represented federally by Jack Layton.
All these ridings saw sharply higher turnout yesterday than they did in 2011. Trinity-Spadina, where Liberal Han Dong defeated long-time incumbent NDP MPP Rosario Marchese, saw a 23 per cent increase in voter turnout, the highest in the province.
NDPers who voted Grit in Toronto last night must be in shock. If not that, then at least red-faced.
Thanks to their decision, they can say goodbye to three accomplished MPPs (Rosario Marchese, Michael Prue and Jonah Schein) look at the rest of the province and realize how brilliantly they got played.
Let’s start with Kathleen Wynne, who got Toronto voters in an all-out panic about a possible PC victory. T.O. NDPers fell for that big time, showing no confidence in the fact that there’s nothing about Ontario 20 years after Mike Harris to suggest the province has a taste for a right-wing agenda.
But the famous letter sent by NDP dissidents to Horwath plainly had a huge impact. Most of the signees were well-known Torontonians with major influence. I’m not sure exactly what they were trying to accomplish. The letter was sure to be leaked – signers encouraged those who received it to send it to “all their contacts.”
The NDP platform did not come out of the blue overnight but was part of a strategy developed over years. Did signatories honestly think that they could just dictate party policy from on high? How would NDP leader Andrea Horwath look if she caved? Not like much of a leader, in my view.
And what did those who signed the letter get out of it? The party lost three seats in Toronto.
Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?
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