Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory indicates he won't fight for his job if the party doesn't want him following a bitter election defeat.
Tory told Toronto radio station CFRB on Thursday that while he would be quite happy to stay, "You can't stay where you're not wanted to stay, quite frankly."
While the Tories gained a seat over their 2003 provincial election total, the Liberals won a second majority term in Wednesday's vote.
Two Ontario politics observers both think the results mean Tory won't be around to fight in the next election.
"I think the party, which has been trying to figure out whether it's conservative or progressive, has now seen two progressive leaders take them in the wrong direction," Michael Harris, talk show host with CFRA Radio in Ottawa, told Canada AM on Thursday.
John Moore, a talk show host with CFRB Radio in Toronto, added: "I don't know of any leader who has ever lost an election, decreased their party's popular vote and lost their own seat and managed to hold on."
Tory lost to Liberal Education Minister Kathleen Wynne in the Toronto riding of Don Valley West.
Polling showed the Tories had been close to the Liberals going into the campaign.
However, Tory's proposal to extend public funding to private religious schools fell flat amongst voters. The Liberals effectively made that issue the ballot question.
When the votes were counted, the Dalton McGuinty-led Liberals emerged with their party's first back-to-back majorities since 1937.
Here are the seat totals, with popular vote share in brackets:
- Liberals - 71 (42.2 per cent)
- Conservatives - 26 (31.6 per cent)
- NDP - 10 (16.8 per cent)
- Greens - 0 (8 per cent)
Only 52.6 per cent of eligible Ontario voters cast ballots.
A Conservative spokesperson said Tory was laying low on Thursday and not granting media interviews. He instead planned to spend the time with his family after the long campaign.
The NDP had hoped for much better in this campaign, but didn't build on the seat total it had at dissolution of the legislature.
While the NDP wanted to make the Liberal government's broken promises the ballot issue, that didn't happen.
NDP Leader Howard Hampton faced questions towards the end of the campaign about whether this would be his last as leader. He said Wednesday night that he would be back.
"Our percentage of the (popular) vote went up by ... about four per cent, and we'd like to see a significant increase in the number of seats you win, but that doesn't always happen," Hampton said.
Moore described Hampton as a "good and decent man" who has been around for about 11 years.
"His time is probably over as well," he said.
While the NDP vote share did rise, and the Green Party's more than doubled, Moore said Ontarians still have bad memories of the NDP government of Bob Rae and the Conservative governments of Mike Harris.
Harris told Canada AM that on his show, people are saying it might be time for the Progressive Conservatives to return to the right-wing policies that were the hallmark of the Harris era.
Moore said the callers to his show tend to be conservatives, and many of them "actually hate Dalton McGuinty."
But "I don't think that anger contaminated the entire voting pool," he said.
McGuinty had promised in the 2003 campaign to not raise taxes. He then imposed a health-care premium that raked in about $2.5 billion per year.
Tory wanted to make that tax hike and broken promise his ballot question.
However, Moore said many Ontarians have come to the view that the unpopular premium was probably necessary.
Michael Harris said Tory could have won at least a minority except for his faith-based schools policy.
Many conservatives told his show they liked Tory but couldn't support the Progressive Conservatives because of that policy, he said.
Tory eventually said the policy would be put to a free vote in the legislature -- which would have effectively killed it, since some of his caucus opposed the plan -- but it was too little, too late.
"I tried to put forward an honest answer to a problem that people know exists and I think I paid a price for that honesty. It seems difficult to be really honest and to campaign with integrity, which I really tried to do," Tory told CFRB.
In Ottawa on Thursday morning, McGuinty told supporters that Ontario voters have shown they prefer the positive to the negative, and want the government to stay focused on health care and education.
His Liberal government's record isn't perfect, but voters saw value in the progress that's been made since 2003, McGuinty said.
Writing in Thursday's Globe and Mail, Ontario politics columnist Murray Campbell said McGuinty likely won't have a "supremely buoyant economy" to help balance the books in his second term.
The premier will also have to deal with many other tough issues, some of which didn't get a very good airing during the campaign:
- Loss of manufacturing jobs (150,000 in five years),
- Labour negotiations with civil servants in 2008,
- Funding for cities, and
- Electricity generation
"Mr. McGuinty will be tested and tested again. We will find out very quickly how deep his leadership skills are," Campbell wrote.
