this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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The victory isn't surprising. The margin is.
Also I listened to the guys speech and he sounded coherent at first, then he went on about the liberal elites running the corps that make life more expensive for working people and I fucking lost it. Straight face and all, truly believing this, or an amazing actor. So close to grasping the trurh!
He knows his audience, and this audience doesn't give a damn what happens as long as their house value goes up and their property taxes go down.
Durham is...weird. Other than some very small pockets, it's like no one really lives there. Oh, sure, there's schools and strip malls and housing developments, but there is almost no industry outside of big-box retail: everyone is either in construction, or works in Markham or Toronto. There's little to no stake that anyone has in the community, outside of mercenary concerns about taxes, so as long as you keep the numbers going in the right direction, you're golden. The reason Liberal support collapsed is purely because of those mercenary concerns: largely a) inflation, and b) housing (being either unaffordable, or, perversely, dropping in value. Yeah, weird, I know...)
So when you have a community that doesn't care about the community except for the value of it, it's going to be ripe for the kind of politician that only talks about money. Social concerns come into it, but only couched around how they're costing you money. It's Conservative, but more Doug Ford conservative than Pierre Poillevre conservative.
Put it this way. Toronto has "citizens". Montreal has "citizens". Even places like Lanark County, Ontario, have "citizens". Durham has "taxpayers".
Right but the policies he's suggesting aren't going to keep their property values high or their grocery bills low. I'm not even going as far as expecting them to give a shit about social issues.