FIFTEEN. Reclaiming the ‚Pink Palace’: The Progressive Conservative Party Comes in from the Cold

Woolstencroft, Peter

doi:10.3138/9781442670198-016

“…Historically, the roots of executive domination reflected Ontario's political culture, which has been described as a hybrid of a conservative cast of mind oriented toward stability, good governance, and careful leadership, mixed with a progressive notion of fair play and equal treatment for all. 3 Robert Williams notes that "values like elitism, hierarchy, continuity, stability and social order" are elements in Ontario's political culture which could be classified as "conservative." 4 Donald C. MacDonald argues that the Ontario political culture values conservatism and stability but with a progressive element, where success is achieved at the ideological centre by pragmatic governments.…”

Section: Political Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Democratizing the Ontario Legislature: Change, but Change Enough?

Raney,

Tregebov,

Inwood

2023

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0

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The Ontario Legislative Assembly sits at the centre of the many currents of political change in the province. Over the last few decades the three main political parties, the Progressive Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the New Democratic Party (NDP), has each formed a majority government at least once. In the 2011 provincial election, Ontarians voted for change again, albeit of a different kind: Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were left one seat short of a majority, and Ontarians had elected their first minority government in a generation. In two by-elections in September 2012, Ontarians denied Premier McGuinty the opportunity to return to majority government. Just one month later, the Premier announced his resignation and prorogued (suspended) the legislature. These events raise questions about the democratic quality and evolving role of the Ontario Legislature. Amidst these changes, we ask: is Ontario’s legislature as democratic as it could be? This paper is organized around three key themes: the institutional features of the Ontario legislature, legislative processes, and political representation. We canvass various reforms and proposed changes in each thematic area and conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Ontario’s legislature as an instrument of democracy. We suggest that despite some reforms, the processes of making it more democratic remain unfinished. To this end, we also make several recommendations for improving the democratic quality of this central symbol of democracy in Ontario.

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“…Historically, the roots of executive domination reflected Ontario's political culture, which has been described as a hybrid of a conservative cast of mind oriented toward stability, good governance, and careful leadership, mixed with a progressive notion of fair play and equal treatment for all. 3 Robert Williams notes that "values like elitism, hierarchy, continuity, stability and social order" are elements in Ontario's political culture which could be classified as "conservative." 4 Donald C. MacDonald argues that the Ontario political culture values conservatism and stability but with a progressive element, where success is achieved at the ideological centre by pragmatic governments.…”

Section: Political Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Democratizing the Ontario Legislature: Change, but Change Enough?

Raney,

Tregebov,

Inwood

2023

Preprint

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Ontario Legislative Assembly sits at the centre of the many currents of political change in the province. Over the last few decades the three main political parties, the Progressive Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the New Democratic Party (NDP), has each formed a majority government at least once. In the 2011 provincial election, Ontarians voted for change again, albeit of a different kind: Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were left one seat short of a majority, and Ontarians had elected their first minority government in a generation. In two by-elections in September 2012, Ontarians denied Premier McGuinty the opportunity to return to majority government. Just one month later, the Premier announced his resignation and prorogued (suspended) the legislature. These events raise questions about the democratic quality and evolving role of the Ontario Legislature. Amidst these changes, we ask: is Ontario’s legislature as democratic as it could be? This paper is organized around three key themes: the institutional features of the Ontario legislature, legislative processes, and political representation. We canvass various reforms and proposed changes in each thematic area and conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Ontario’s legislature as an instrument of democracy. We suggest that despite some reforms, the processes of making it more democratic remain unfinished. To this end, we also make several recommendations for improving the democratic quality of this central symbol of democracy in Ontario.

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“…lists the forty-nine items in the postwar sample whose titles refer exclusively to struggle among parties. The days surrounding Mike Harris' first Speech from the Throne saw a white-hot partisan battle (see Cameron and White 2000;Noel 1997;Woolstencroft 1997). By the end of their first term in office, "after four years of sweeping and often highly contested economic, social, and administrative reforms, the Conservatives confronted a deeply polarized electorate" (Tanguay 2002, 145).…”

Section: The Legislative Opening As a Partisan Battlegroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

From social celebration to politics as usual : newspaper coverage of the Legislative opening in Ontario, 1900-2007

Cairns¹

2021

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This dissertation analyzes twentieth century changes in the representation of political authority in Ontario. It does so by conducting narrative analysis and framing analysis of newspaper coverage of the ceremonial Opening of the Legislature. In contrast to standard political science approaches to this key civic ritual, the dissertation builds upon cultural theory that views news as central to the social construction of reality and addresses three research questions: In what ways has the meaning of the legislative opening been represented in mainstream Ontario newspapers? How have mass mediated processes of ritualization changed over time? And what do answers to the first two questions suggest about the development of popular conceptions of political legitimacy in Ontario? Textual analysis demonstrates that social knowledge about the legislative opening has changed significantly between 1900 and 2007. During the first half of the twentieth century, journalists approached and described the Opening of the Legislature as a Social Celebration: a popular festival at Queen's Park that was also a break from routine policy discourse and partisan battle. By contrast, by the 1970s coverage was organized around the Speech from the Throne. Increasingly aggressive journalistic tones and techniques represented the ritual as a performance of rationality--a special iteration of Politics as Usual. Once a celebration of social order centred around Ontario High Society, the legislative opening is now depicted as a debate among competing interests in Ontario society. While remaining critical of the emergent ritual of liberal-pluralism for its part in normalizing systems of inequality, the dissertation argues that changes in newspaper coverage both reflect and reinforce the rise of what Smith calls "electoral democracy", a conception of politics in which extra-parliamentary actors are legitimized as participants in government. At the level of scholarly practice, the study makes an original contribution to recent debates in media anthropology by using longitudinal textual analysis to study the ritualization of civic ritual; and shifts in news coverage are used to advocate further interdisciplinary studies of legislative politics in Canada.

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FIFTEEN. Reclaiming the ‚Pink Palace’: The Progressive Conservative Party Comes in from the Cold

Cited by 6 publications

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Democratizing the Ontario Legislature: Change, but Change Enough?

Democratizing the Ontario Legislature: Change, but Change Enough?

Democratizing the Ontario Legislature: Change, but Change Enough?

From social celebration to politics as usual : newspaper coverage of the Legislative opening in Ontario, 1900-2007

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