Quote:
Originally Posted by Stingray2004
True. However Hudak would not have flown in either BC, AB, SK, or MB either in my honest opinion. His quasi-radical platform spooked too many people in ON and would have done same thing here. Certainly not old school ON PC such as Bill Davis.
And the Reform Party was also perceived suspiciously in ON, back in the 1990`s, as some unknown western-based, right-wing political animal invading their (centrist, red tory) territory. IMHO.
Even then, apparently quite a few 1990`s seat races in ON resulted in the Reform and PCs splitting the vote allowing the Liberals to sneak up the middle.
Seems to have all changed with the Conservative party becoming or perceived to be more `mainstream`, over the past decade, with many voting segments in ON IMHO.
In any event, am quite certain that ON`s 905-belt will decide this year`s election outcome.
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Yep, I was a kid at the time, but I remember Reform was kind of seen as a party of Bible-thumping racists - at least by most of the adults I would've been surrounded by at the time. You rarely saw Reform signs on people's lawns (or anywhere else for that matter). They were, for us in the GTA, only a fringe party and not a serious option. The Liberals were also benefiting from a weakened NDP that few were taking seriously either. Even "safe" NDP seats in Toronto and Hamilton were voting overwhelmingly Liberal through much of the 90s and early 2000s.
When we compare election results over time, I think we sometimes forget that the population itself is far from static. A substantial chunk of the people voting during the Chretien/Martin years are, well, dead. And a substantial number of voters today were ineligible to vote at the time, either because they were too young or because they weren't citizens yet. On top of that you have hundreds of thousands - if not millions - who've moved since then. I'd be very interested to see the rate of voter turnover in ridings across the country. I'd imagine that those rates would be especially high in and around our major cities.
My riding, for example, was once one of the safest Liberal seats in the country, but their vote share has been decreasing for the past 10-15 years and it went solidly NDP the last time around. I don't think that's because individual voters have shifted left en masse (though certainly some have) - older die hard Liberals have been dying off, their children having been moving to the suburbs, new immigrants have moved in and gentrification has brought in a more traditionally lefty crowd.
All of that aside, one of the Conservative's greatest successes since the right united has been their ability to break the Liberal hold on the immigrant vote (the NDP have also had success on this front, and even the Bloc was making inroads). Conservative strongholds in the West have become much more diverse places over the past decades. I think the Liberals were hoping that that would make them more competitive out there, but the reverse has happened. The Conservatives have been able to present a more diverse face to the GTA thanks in no small part to a more diverse base in Calgary, Edmonton, &c. It would be much more difficult today to suggest they're a bunch of closet white supremacists.
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