It’s the votes not the seats that mattered
On May 2, although the Liberals had led in seat count for some of the evening, the final result was a Progressive Conservative minority government. The party took 52 seats, a drop of 18 from 1981. The Liberals were just behind winning 48, an increase of 14 while the NDP in third went to 25 from 21 in 1981. More significant though, the Liberals were ahead in total votes, winning 34, 921 more than the Tories, capturing 37.9 per cent of the votes cast. The Conservatives took 36.9 per cent and the NDP with 23.8 per cent.
Peterson called it “ a magnificent moment” while a dejected Miller said “we’ll try to make it work” but also stating “the Progressive Conservative party at this moment is still the government and I am proud of that.”
It turned out that the Liberals turned out to be prescient in their projections of the PCs strengths and weaknesses and Miller. The Conservatives did well in Northern Ontario, lost some votes across the largely rural ridings of southwest and eastern Ontario but their share of vote collapsed by 14 percentage points in Metro Toronto.
For the NDP, Bob Rae ran “a principled but uninspired and badly organized campaign at a moment when the province was ready to consider real change. His party carried 25 seats, only slightly more than it had in the Tory landslide on 1981. Rae exhausted and disappointed was confronted by a situation that, no matter which choice he made, appeared perilous for his party.” Perilous perhaps but also containing the seeds of opportunity to help engineer a dramatic political change for Ontario as Rae told his supporters on election night that there would be “interesting discussions” ahead.
That opportunity may never come again
The Liberals saw that opportunity as well. The key to what happened next was the vote share. While the Liberals were second in seats they obtained a slightly larger share of the total vote than the progressive Conservatives. In their minds, that opened the door for the Liberals to claim they had a right to be considered for government providing they could reach an arrangement with the New Democrats that would ensure a Liberal government wouldn’t be quickly defeated in the days or weeks after it took over from the PCs.
The Conservatives had the most seats but the voters had given the Liberals and NDP a chance to end the Tory dynasty. It would take courage and creative thinking to turn that into a reality. Some in both the Liberal and NDP caucuses thought it was time to start that process right away. Peterson and Miller both called Rae the day after the election, with Miller confident he could work with Rae.
But the premier made what turned out to be a crippling mistake that same morning after the election. Talking to reporters in Bracebridge, Miller blamed separate school funding for the Conservative failure to win another majority. Tory voters had stayed home in protest, Milller said. He would have to consider what that message meant adding he could no longer make guarantees. “Look, last night all the rules changed, didn’t they?”, he added.
The impact of Milller’s post election musings
Liberal education critic Sean Conway was very upset with Miller’s comments, fearing the Conservatives were trying to back out of the whole separate school funding issue, dropping the mess into the laps of the Liberals. Although he had been skeptical of the idea of trying to form a government with the NDP in the immediate aftermath of the election, Conway had changed his mind. On May 4, he began efforts to arrange a meeting with NDP MPP Richard Johnston to talk informally about the possibility of putting an arrangement together that would mean the NDP might support a Liberal government.
That started the ball rolling to end the Progressive Conservative hold on power but there would still be lots of meetings, discussion and even some disagreements before the Liberal and NDP negotiating teams struck an accord weeks after the initial talks began and after the Miller government failed to persuade the NDP to support them.
