You’re probably quite tired by now of reading about the Ontario election and all the so-called firsts — first back-to-back Liberal majority since 1937, the first one-issue campaign — especially if you’re a Conservative.

But before the Oct. 10 vote is assigned to history, it is worth looking at a couple of factors that led to Conservative leader John Tory’s defeat by such a wide margin.

Just as the electioneering techniques used by the federal Conservatives in 2006 were closely watched because of their innovation, some of the methods used by the Ontario Liberals were being closely watched in Ottawa.

Some examples:

> How Clean Was It? By now, Premier Dalton McGuinty’s great, squeaky clean campaign is firmly ensconced in Canadian political lore. Indeed, the mild-mannered premier was reminiscent of Bill Davis in his prime, with his warm, fuzzy reassurances and platitudes.

For the most part, the governing party responded to the Tories’ and the NDP’s negative messaging with feel-good TV commercials about how much better things have become in Ontario since the Liberals took power in 2003.

Particularly clever was the spot used late into the campaign in which the Grits thank the voters for improving Ontario by having the good sense to vote Liberal in 2003.

But the Liberals did not reject negative campaigning altogether. On the Internet, Liberal messaging was some of the nastiest ever used in an Ontario election.

The Internet has been playing an increasing part in elections since the early 1990s, but this campaign provides an interesting glimpse of what electioneering in the future could possibly look like.

The Liberals were running at least two Web sites of their own. Some of the campaign ads had a homemade, sophomoric look to them. John Tory’s daily diary, which looks like it was made by inebriated college students, is particularly cruel. (View it on www.torytube.ca.) Others looked as professionally produced as any television commercial, in particular, a parody of Apple Inc.’s popular Mac vs. PC commercials.

Of course, all of the Liberal Internet ads wound up on You Tube (www.youtube.com) and other favourite cyberspace stops. So, limits on campaign spending and other election rules could well prove meaningless as reliance on the Internet grows in future elections.

The Liberals were clearly following a strategy of keeping things clean in the media most likely to be used by older, more conservative voters while testing limits on the Web when appealing to younger and strident voters.

And, of course, election rules — such as the blackout period for TV commercials in the final 48 hours of the campaign — don’t mean much on the Web.

> U.S.-Style Interventions. Political action committees, such as the Swift Boat Veterans of 2004, have been playing an increasing role in U.S. elections for two decades. But third-party interveners have had a limited role in Canadian elections.

An important player in the Ontario election was a group called the Working Families Coalition, which ran some expensive-looking television commercials reminding voters of the school strikes and cutbacks during the years when Concervative Mike Harris was premier.

The Tories have complained to Elections Ontario that this group was no more than a front for the Liberals to get around campaign spending rules. Whether this coalition was part of the Liberal machine is not really important: it was clearly a fellow traveller bearing Liberal-friendly ads.

There was enough money in the Working Family Coalition’s war chest to dominate prime-time television in the 10 days leading up to the start of the campaign. With limits on what political parties can spend in elections — and, in some jurisdictions, limits on contributions — vested interests with money will play an increasing role in Canadian politics.

U.S.-style PACs haven’t received much consideration in the drafting of Canadian election laws, federally or provincially, so far. That absence will accelerate their use. Any group wishing to bypass spending controls or disclosure requirements will be tempted to set up a PAC.

What’s interesting about the Working Family Coalition is that some of the largest unions — the Canadian Auto Workers or the Ontario Secondary School Teachers — are among the sponsors listed on the Working Family Coalition’s Web site.

This is the next best thing to formalizing labour’s shift away from suporting the NDP to supporting the Liberals. It will be interesting to see what McGuinty’s second majority government will have to do to keep labour’s support.

@page_break@There’s one other thing worth noting. New Democrat leader Howard Hampton’s comments about the media allowing faith-based funding to push other urgent issues out of the campaign may have been said out of frustration. But the NDP leader did have a point: journalists should be asking themselves how issues such as a sagging provincial economy and health care suddenly became so much less important once the campaign began in earnest. IE