Our election prediction: a close finish provincially
AToronto Star Web Forum showed that in response to being asked whether anything in the Ontario election campaign had "swayed your vote," 81% of the online respondents said "no."

We suspect that if the same question were asked today, the result will be pretty much the same.

If nothing else, the poll reflected the fact that most Ontarians saw little new in the party platforms and the leaders' speeches, or even as a result of the televised leaders' debate, which saw Premier Dalton McGuinty targeted by both Opposition Leader John Tory and NDP leader Howard Hampton as a champion of broken promises.

The poll pretty much mirrored the traditional opinion polls, which have shown relatively little movement in voter preferences, with the Liberals enjoying a slight lead in popularity over the Progressive Conservatives, the New Democrats well back in third place and the Green Party enjoying marginally more support than was achieved in previous elections.

It seems pretty obvious that the province is going to have its first minority government since 1985 - but certainly not the last if the referendum results in approval and adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system and its absurd reduction in the number of locally elected MPPs to 90 from the current 107.

Hampton has been accurate in his observation that there's little difference, really, between the two parties, with the Conservatives under Tory clearly in the middle of the political spectrum promising pretty much what you'd expect to hear from McGuinty if he were trying to topple a Tory government.

Throughout the campaign, the two biggest issues have been the McGuinty Liberals' broken promises and Tory's pledge to extend public funding to faith-based schools.

Even the premier himself admits the obvious - that he has been unable to keep many of the promises he made as opposition leader in 2003.

The universally hated "health tax" - really a partial restoration of the cuts in income tax rates made by the Mike Harris Conservatives is raising roughly $3 billion annually, yet even with it the Liberals barely managed to balance the provincial budget during an economic boom.

Given that the government stands accused of still not putting enough money into health care and education, it would have been grossly irresponsible for the Grits to have foregone the income tax hike and add $3 billion annually to the huge debt loan it inherited after 12 years of NDP and Conservative rule.

Coming at a time when the soaring Canadian dollar and Asian imports are crushing our manufacturing sector, the Conservatives' pledge to scrap the health tax while injecting more money into health care makes no economic sense and would inevitably plunge us into a fresh run of multibillion dollar budget deficits. We would have much preferred Tory to promise a package of tax reforms aimed at making the overall provincial taxation system more equitable while ensuring balanced budgets whenever the economy is reasonably healthy.

The other pledge that has clearly become the Achilles' heel of the Tory campaign is the commitment to fund all faith-based schools.

Although the Conservatives claim the promise would cost the government just $400 million a year and the Liberals suggest it would be $500 million, the truth is that no one knows, and both figures seem to be based on an assumption that the funding would not result in any new faith-based schools or the "conversion" of other private schools through affiliation with a church, synagogue, mosque or temple.

There's surely no doubt that the existing system is enormously discriminatory, but the answer to the problem must lie in the creation of a single publicly funded school system in which all faiths would be welcomed to provide weekly instruction in that faith's beliefs.

Locally, there's little doubt that Sylvia Jones will win Dufferin-Caledon for the Conservatives. We hope that the result will be a lot closer than Tory's byelection triumph, when he garnered 56% of the votes in the old riding of Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey.

Rightly or wrongly, we see the McGuinty government's commitment to extend Highway 410 and widen Highway 10 as an indication the Liberals haven't written off the new riding as unwinnable.

Clearly, the best result locally would be one that sees substantial support for Jones's three opponents, Liberal Betsy Hall, the NDP's Lynda McDougall and the Green Party's Rob Strang, all of whom have done a good job both in representing their parties.