John Ivison
National Post
September 6, 2003

Wawa: Veteran Queen’s Park reporters admit, shame-faced, how they helped to elect Bob Rae in 1990 by completely ignoring him.

Rae didn’t even unveil his platform until two weeks into the campaign, and it was only in its dying days that it became clear he was likely to unseat David Peterson.

And so to Wawa, in the shadow of its giant Canada goose, to ensure that Howard Hampton does not fly under the media radar screen straight into power.

Could history repeat itself? Not according to today’s Compas poll, which has the NDP languishing at 12% support – way behind the Liberals’ 46% and the Tories’ 41%. Hampton maintained yesterday that polls at this stage of the campaign are irrelevant, but there will undoubtedly be potential NDP voters who will switch to the Liberals if they think an NDP vote is wasted and might help the Tories sneak back into office.

The New Democrats have slipped even since the last Compas poll, taken in the immediate aftermath of last month’s blackout.

While most observers expect they will retain the seats they already hold, there is skepticism about their ability to break through in areas like the Kawarthas, London and the industrial ridings in the 905 belt around Toronto, where they have hopes of adding seats.

Arguably, Hampton has chosen the wrong issues on which to campaign and is proposing the wrong solutions to the problems he has identified.

Earlier in the day, standing outside the Falconbridge plant in the Nickel Belt riding of his wife, Shelley Martel, you could see why Hampton’s party is sometimes taken less than seriously. The NDP leader was waving around a large hunk of Swiss cheese, full of holes, which was somehow meant to represent the shortcomings of his rivals’ hydro policies.

While the Tories have proven as much fun as a trip to the proctologist, and the Liberals tend toward pomposity, the NDP have become the Monty Python of Ontario politics. They regularly pull stunts like Hydrozilla, which requires some hapless staffer to stalk senior Tories while wearing a rubber Godzilla suit, and now the Swiss cheese sketch, with its refrain of "What have the Tories ever done for us?"

The responsibility for ensuring that they are not bringing out their dead come Oct. 2 rests with Hampton. In the first week of the campaign, he has identified the issues he thinks resonate with Ontarians – auto insurance on Thursday, hydro yesterday – and he has moved to paint Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty and Premier Ernie Eves as two sides of the same profit-driven coin.

Against the hardscrabble landscape of northern Ontario, Hampton tried to portray an inimical link between the prosperity of the north and the hydro issue. He called Wawa the "canary in the coal mine" – a harbinger of the evils of electricity deregulation.

Wawa saw its hydro prices more than double because the local hydro company was able to dictate prices once they were deregulated, with the result that local companies such as Dubreuil Forest Products laid off hundreds of workers.

Unfortunately for Hampton, the mill workers and grandmothers who turned out to support him did not display his maniacal zeal for the subject. To give the NDP leader his due, if the Son of God had stopped off in Wawa and started talking about kilowatts and gigajoules, he would have had a hard job attracting a crowd.

The problem for Hampton goes deeper than simply picking an issue that doesn’t move people. While many potential NDP voters give him credit for identifying problems like hydro, tainted meat and auto insurance, they don’t necessarily agree with his solutions.

Yesterday in Sudbury, he said the province should build new electricity generating capacity, in the form of billion-dollar power plants. "It will cost less than paying for it privately," he said, adding higher interest costs, profit margins and executive pay would all drive up the cost of private power.

But critics of this policy point out we already have direct experience of public power at work, in the form of the Pickering A nuclear plant, which is four years behind schedule and 200% over budget.

"The government may be able to borrow money more easily but that’s just giving them more rope with which to hang themselves," said Tom Adams, executive director of think-tank Energy Probe.

"Building generating plants is risky. Businesses can go bankrupt and I don’t want the public sector to take those risks. The solution is to go back to the market."

Hampton was a lone voice of alarm on the hydro file for a couple of years before it started making headlines. When the lights went out last month, he appeared vindicated and the critics who accused him of being alarmist were humbled. He should have been able to translate that prescience into electoral support.

But, unlike other leaders in this election race, Hampton is burdened with a burning belief in the singular correctness of his vision. There is no room for compromise on issues like ownership in his dogmatic world. It is this rigidity that means he is unlikely to repeat Bob Rae’s feat of 1990.

As former Clinton advisor Dick Morris notes in his book Power Plays: "The man who stands on his convictions waiting for the world to come around must be prepared to go patiently into the wilderness." That may end up being Hampton’s fate.