For Meet The Candidate all 31 candidates in Waterloo Region were invited to participate, but only 13 accepted the invitation. Some candidates tactfully declined, but most just ignored our requests. So, for this last episode of Meet The Candidate on Tuesday 25 February 2025, Martin de Groot and Bob Jonkman discuss the Ontario provincial election campaign of 2025.
Martin de Groot is the host and producer of Home Range: Promenade which airs on CKMS-FM every Monday at 6:00pm.
Bob Jonkman is one of the hosts of CKMS Community Connections, every Monday at 11:00am and alternate Fridays at 3:00pm.
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1m010s | The beginning: Calling an early election. Why? Not for the reasons provided; a provincial premier has no role in international relations. The short campaign time was probably deliberate. Discussing the media coverage of the parties — even though the NDP is the official opposition, the media tends to go to the Liberals for comment, even though they don’t even have enough members in the legislature to form an official party. One of the reasons for calling an early provincial election (in February!) may be the looming federal election. |
| 6m40s | Politics has become polarized, started in the Mike Harris years (1990s), maybe as early as the Mulroney/Reagan/Thatcher era (late 1970s). Up until that time it was the Liberals that took Republican ideas from the US; now it’s the Conservatives taking those ideas. Bob runs down the different candidates running in Waterloo Region. The smaller parties are largely invisible; because of the short campaign time and the time of year (and even the mood of the country) they haven’t been able to get in gear. Along with so few candidates, Bob fears there will be low voter turnout. There are people who don’t even know there’s an election on. Voter turnout at the last election was around 40%, it will probably be lower this time. Martin points out that these aren’t provincial campaigns, but local campaigns just in our own constituency; each is a decision in itself. |
| 12m20s | Campaign advertising: Bob has seen only mainstream party advertising, none at all for the small parties. Bob and Martin see only online ads, neither watch broadcast TV. There was no election advertising submitted to Radio Waterloo. Martin asks about candidate response to Meet The Candidates. About half the candidates came on the air. There were 24 available timeslots, 13 candidates came out. Bob expresses surprise at some of the candidates that declined. Having candidates on air, unstructured, gives a better idea of what the candidate is like outside their campaign. Martin asks if this turnout was typical, but it was the first time Bob has run Meet The Candidate. All the episodes were recorded, and candidates are free to re-use the material under a CC-BY license. |
| 19m10s | Has there been a lot of negative advertising? Martin says yes. The positive advertising has been limited to the leaders saying “I’m your leader, I will save you”, but that’s still somewhat misleading. Martin has met some canvassers at the door, the Liberals twice (and he met the candidate herself). But it takes more than knocking on doors; things like Civic Tech (https://waterlooregionvotes.org). Martin says an election is a collective decision-making process, he want to be aligned with the plurality of his neighbours. He wants more input into this process, so people should join parties. It’s dangerous to pay attention to the little jingles in mass media and then to base your vote on that. But people can get away with being complacent because we have pretty good governance in Canada. We haven’t adjusted our system since the start of our electoral system, so it’s not reflecting the way people vote. Our system is more adaptive than, say, the US voting system, but in practice we still have the adversarial “debates” in parliament and the provincial legislature, and a terrible First-Past-The-Post voting system. As a result, the current Ontario government was elected to a majority of seats with only about 18% of the votes from eligible voters. |
| 27m15s | Talking about Cooperate For Canada, who were on CKMS Community Connection on Monday 24 February. Martin says their idea is reactive, because it relies on dubious polling data. Cooperate For Canada looks to be more of a federal system, they didn’t really have time to react for this provincial election. Martin tends to vote with the plurality anyway, so he had no trouble signing their pledge. Martin wishes there was a better way to have a deliberative process, that there were other kinds of political organizations instead of running candidates and being a political party in the traditional sense. Martin cares about the Arts and Heritage, which doesn’t even make it to the political spectrum. If people who cared about climate, housing, health care, education, &c made an effort to come up with a consensus, then we’d get somewhere. Voting against the Conservatives based on polling data is dropping out of the system, you’re not even trying. Bob want to vote for the candidate who will best represent him; if Cooperate For Canada was successful and candidates drop out, it reduces the choice available to voters and so reduces the effectiveness of democracy. Bob also points out that the polling data is unreliable, he doesn’t speak to pollsters and other people are known to lie. And the polling data includes data from people who don’t vote, and aren’t even eligible to vote. The election on 27 February 2025 is the only poll that counts. |
| 37m05s | Martin points out a difference between him and Bob: Bob wants voting to be private and secret; Martin wants voting to be a collective, consensus making effort. We’ve lost consensus-making with our adversarial electoral system. It’s as though we’ve ritualized civil war with elections, and that’s not healthy for society. Elections are a way to quiet down the revolutionary impulse. It used to be, that the differences between parties was fairly minor. But today there is a broad gap. Treating the Conservatives as one pole and having all others going against them gives them too much credit and credibility. This is not just campaigning but their actions while in government. Martin saw this when Mike Harris Sr. was premier. |
| 39m52s | It is difficult to make a choice, since so many right-wing candidates aren’t coming out to debates, interviews, all-candidate meetings. Yet they’re still leading in the polls. Are people voting for the party leader? The party itself? They certainly can’t be voting for the local candidate, since they haven’t been there. Martin attributes it to the republican idea of “the lying press”, so those candidates just stay away, thinking they’re not going to get a fair shake. That may be true, especially from people who care about the environment, health care, &c. Should there be a rule that candidates have to be available to the voters? You can’t pass that kind of law, but it should be made socially unacceptable. Candidates who don’t want to meet their constituents should not the representative for those constituents. Bob wouldn’t sit down for a beer with a person who’s been hiding during the campaign. Maybe having a beer with a friend is an analogue for elections. |
| 43m47a | What happens now? It’s only two days to the election. Advance polls were short, only three days and at remote locations. Precipitation is expected the night before election day. Martin predicts the voter turnout will be lower than in 2022, and thinks the Conservatives will return with a larger majority than ever. Waterloo Region has one Green MPP, one NDP MPP, and three Conservative MPPs, and Martin thinks it will be the same after the election. Martin expected things would change for Wilmot, what with the land assembly issues, but it looks like that won’t change things. |
| 47m30s | Martin tells Bob that the Green Party candidate in Kitchener — Conestoga has endorsed the NDP candidate. Bob wonders how that will go over with the Green Party head office; it’s unlikely the Green Party approves of this. Martin would like to see not a Green Party, but a Green Movement. With a movement, you could get consensus, get people to become candidates. There may be something like that, in Green WR. Martin and Bob talk about the Grand River Watershed as a natural boundary and focus point for the community. |
| 50m30s | Discussions on the levels of government: Municipal, Regional, Provincial, and Federal. Martin says the relations between those levels of government is a mess, and is the number one issue, more so than electoral reform. But Martin is not an amalgamationist at all. Martin sees the difference between the city cores and the suburbs; Bob adds to that the very different rural areas in Waterloo Region. Bob doesn’t want yet another artificial divide between rural and urban voters. Speaking of geographic boundaries, Martin wonders why we don’t have gerrymandering in Canada. Similar to the Electoral Boundary Commission, Martin would like to see an Electoral Reform Commission based on that model. |
| 55m40s | Goodbyes, acknowledgements, and a suggestion for a regular political show on CKMS. |
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Meet The Candidate