Ontario Liberals won all six Scarborough ridings again Thursday because their Progressive Conservatives opponents were handicapped by the party’s pledge to cut 100,000 public sector jobs, veteran PC candidates agree.
Tory Leader Tim Hudak, who resigned when the Liberal majority win became clear, had coupled his plan to trim public jobs with a promise to cut one million new jobs in the province.
But three PC candidates running in Scarborough, trying to break through against Liberal incumbents, said residents in their ridings only seemed to hear the part about job cuts.
"It’s almost like a political suicide," said Raymond Cho, who ran for the party in Scarborough-Rouge River and suggested, as results came in Thursday, that Hudak may have been too honest.
"Why did he mention cutting jobs? You could just stay with creating jobs and the (Liberal government’s) scandals," added Cho, a city councillor who speculated he would otherwise have won the riding, and Hudak a majority.
"People pay more attention to the cutting than the creating."
The PCs could also have provided more details about the job reductions, saying, for instance, that front-line workers would not be cut, said Cho, though he later added he was glad those jobs would not be disappearing.
Trying to unseat Soo Wong in Scarborough-Agincourt, Liang Chen, who also lost to Wong in 2011, said she had recognized the 100,000 job cut could hand victory to the Liberals.
"When I heard it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be 2011 all over again," she said. "He could have said, ‘We will have a hiring freeze.’ It’s really how you package, how you use your words."
People understand the provincial government is too big, but the 100,000-jobs pledge gave the Liberals ammunition, said Wong, a University of Toronto Scarborough associate dean who argued the Liberals are good at making cuts to services "behind the scenes," citing their recent changes to physiotherapy coverage for seniors as an example.
"They’re not good at admitting what they’re doing."
In Scarborough-Guildwood, Ken Kirupa, a realtor trying to beat Liberal MPP Mitzie Hunter for the second time in less than a year, also said the job cuts "overtook all the other issues" for riding residents, thanks partly to aggressive advertising by interest groups during the campaign.
"That message, I think that was the one that killed this election."
People were scared about losing their jobs, though they reacted differently when told there would be an attrition process to produce the cuts, said Kirupa, adding residents also didn’t seem to have much faith in the PC promise to create a million jobs.
New Democrats also failed to break through in Scarborough, which has stayed Liberal red since 2003.
They came second in the two local ridings with a NDP MP: Scarborough-Rouge River, where the party, with repeat candidate Neethan Shan ,was in a three-way race with Cho and Liberal Bas Balkissoon, and in Scarborough Southwest with a newcomer, Jessie Macaulay. They otherwise did not come close to winning.
Shan, who is also the ONDP president said he was not disappointed with the party’s provincial campaign, which he argued was positive, compared with "a campaign of fear and who to not vote for."
He said he didn’t want to speculate on why Scarborough residents voted as they did, but suggested it was tough to unseat incumbents.
"The familiarity of someone always helps."
Balkissoon, one of those incumbents, conceded the race in his riding had "three known names" and was a bit of a challenge. Still, he did not let on Thursday he had been worried.
"I knew it was going to be close, but I had my solid supporters," he said. "The most I could lose was 10 or 15 per cent, and then I could pick up some."
The Green party ran candidates in all six local ridings, and did best with Anthony Navarro, who got 1,548 votes in Pickering-Scarborough East, and with David Del Grande, who received 1,492 in Scarborough Southwest.