[LINK] Four links on the new Liberal majority government in Ontario

[rfmcdonald]

CBC broke the news of the new Liberal majority government.

Despite being hounded on both sides by rivals who harped on Liberal government scandals during the longer-than-normal campaign, Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne has steered her party to a majority and a commanding electoral victory, based largely on major gains in the Toronto area, while PC Leader Tim Hudak declared he is resigning.

With all ridings reporting some results, Liberals were elected or leading in 59 constituencies to 27 for the Progressive Conservatives and 21 for the NDP.

The strong Liberal showing has its roots in the Greater Toronto Area, where eight seats are poised to change hands — seven of those going to the Liberals. Overall, the results mean the Liberals will be even more concentrated in the GTA.

The Liberals also picked up seats from the Tories in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, Barrie and Northumberland, while they were only poised to lose two: Sudbury and Windsor West.

The outcome was also rosier for the NDP under Leader Andrea Horwath, who was the first of the major party leaders to be declared elected in their home riding tonight. The NDP vote share was at 25 per cent, up from the 23 per cent they achieved in the 2011 campaign.

The NDP vote gains, too, came mostly at the expense of the PCs, with the New Democrats picking up the Tory seat in Oshawa.

The PC share of the popular vote was down more than four percentage points from the last election, as the party dropped eight seats to the Liberals. PC Leader Hudak is keeping his seat, however he announced at 10:45 p.m. ET in his concession speech that he resigning as party leader.

Hudak, as the Hamilton Spectator notes at length, did at least keep his seat.

Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is still king of Niagara West-Glanbrook, if not the province.

Hudak, party leader since 2009, handily took the riding despite spending very little time campaigning on home turf.

"We really benefit from the accumulated credit Tim has built up through his hard work over the nearly 20 years he has represented this area," Tony Kamphuis, Hudak's local campaign manager said by email on Thursday night.

"You can't really take anything for granted, we still worked hard to knock on more doors (and) put up more signs than the other campaigns."

[. . . I]n Niagara West-Glanbrook, it's hard to remember a provincial representative other than Hudak. He has held a seat since 1995, before he'd hit the tender age of 30.

Hudak, 46, was first elected in a riding that hadn't voted Conservative in decades. Electoral boundaries have been redrawn twice since then, but these days Niagara West-Glanbrook runs deep blue. About 50 per cent of about 50,000 voters choose Hudak in 2011. The next closest candidate was Liberal Katie Trombetta at 25 per cent support.

The National Post's Chris Selley dealt with likely infighting in the NDP after losing so many urban ridings in Toronto, including my own riding of Davenport. (I voted Liberal.)

The Toronto Star's Robert Benzie commented on the issues of the opposition, focusing on the NDP and Andrea Horwath.

The NDP leader triggered the vote, which Elections Ontario estimates will cost around $90 million, when she said May 2 that her party, which propped up the Liberals in 2012 and 2013, could not support a left-leaning budget.

Wynne caught the New Democrats flat-footed when hours after Horwath’s gambit she asked Lt.-Gov. David Onley to dissolve the legislature, plunging Ontario into an election.

The Liberals had two campaign buses — wrapped at a cost of $100,000 apiece — ready to go and staged a large downtown Toronto pep rally for staffers that night while the NDP stumbled out of the gate.

Even though Horwath first proposed an Ontario pension plan since 2010 — and ran on it in the 2011 election — she inexplicably dropped it from the New Democrats’ policy handbook after the Liberals included a similar scheme in their left-leaning budget.

It was the most visible example of her distancing herself from the party’s past.

In a debilitating midcampaign move, 34 past and present NDP supporters wrote a letter proclaiming that she was “abandoning” progressive principles in a desperate, populist appeal for votes.

At the same time, a flaccid NDP platform, unimaginatively entitled “Andrea Horwath’s Plan That Makes Sense,” failed to capture the voting public’s imagination.

A free concert Sunday night with world-famous performer K’naan and other artists at Toronto’s Berkeley Theatre was a bust, attracting just 100 people when the NDP had hoped it would propel their campaign in the final days.