NDP Takes KW Bye Election

I'm not exactly sure what to make of the NDP winning the KW bye election with 40.7% of the vote, versus 31.1% for the Tories and 23.6% for the governing Liberals. Obviously not great news for the Tories and Tim Hudak considering that the retiring Elizabeth Witmer had a lock on the riding for the Tories before being enticed away with McGuinty pork appointment.

Not great news for the Liberals either. No majority, and despite their machinations with Witmer they only came up with 23.6% of the vote. Thus the committees stay in opposition hands (more Ornge and even more Ornge) and the opposition can end this government if they feel like it.

The Ontario teachers unions went all in in this bye election and it seems to have some effect. I'm not sure if they can replicate this across the province in the next election, but it doesn't look good for the Liberals. I'm also not sure how many teachers are living in that riding, but I am impressed by the NDP vote.

Finally the KW riding may be changing. In Ontario, urban ridings are pretty much the only place the NDP gets elected. KW has a bigger overall population now and has two sizable universities. That's a recipe for more NDP votes. We'll see what happens to this riding in the next election.

RIM's Tanking's Effect on the Ontario Economy

Certainly everyone has heard that about RIM's bad first quarter 2012 results. I'm not going to go over them although I will point out that I was predicting they were going to suck in April. People shouldn't have been surprised. Here's another tip, this quarter's results, ending today won't be good either, but we won't know precisely until the end of September. The final nail in the coffin was the delay in the BB10 operating system. Certainly RIM spending billions buying back shares looks particularly half-witted now.

RIM compared to the entire Ontario economy is obviously small, however considering Ontario under Dalton McGuinty has basically become a public sector based economy (like France, but without the multinationals partially owned by the state) it was an important part of the private sector economy in Ontario. Especially considering its importance to exports and the fact that RIM isn't like a hair dresser in that it doesn't have to be in Ontario. Beyond auto parts and in a sense banking services and mining, Ontario's exports have been moribund the past few years. This won't be good for Ontario's economy or tax revenues.

Fortunately for Hamilton, the effects of RIM imploding is minimal, apart from some locals living in Hamilton and working for RIM. KW is a different story. Sure there's a lot of high tech startups in Waterloo, but the majority of those will implode or stay small. Plus they don't pay remarkably well and are very engineer heavy and light everything else in terms of employment. Can the KW economy absorb all the soon to be former RIM employees? Sure the good people will find jobs but the dead weight that every big company builds up will have trouble. Expect a lot of vacant office space in KW.