Ontario's political parties have been promising to take the high road to next

year's election, but they're already slipping toward some detours in the valley.

The politicians said they would avoid negatives and personal name-calling after a nasty byelection in which voters seemed to warn that they would not support those who use such tactics.

The Liberals under Premier Dalton McGuinty had dug under rocks and revealed the New Democrat candidate sold drugs while living on the streets and expressed sympathy for a notorious killer, but this backfired and they lost the seat.

McGuinty acknowledged there had been faults in his party's approach. The Progressive Conservatives and NDP could not be blamed in this case, except for provoking the Liberals with hard-hitting attacks.

Now that the legislature has resumed sitting, the parties are having difficulty keeping their promise.

Since being elected to govern in 2003, the Liberals have tried to deflect almost every criticism by saying former Conservative premier Mike Harris caused the problem by cutting services to reduce taxes.

It is not sleazy or negative to say a former government did a poor job, but endless repetition of it - McGuinty would mention it if asked what the weather is like - suggests the government wants to avoid taking responsibility for current concerns and frays tempers.

His first words, after Conservative leader John Tory asked in his first question what the government would do to help autistic children, were that it already has done a lot more than Harris.

The premier was asked why he has not found a permanent solution to a dispute in Caledonia, where natives who claim ownership of a planned building site have occupied it for months, and he again brought back Harris.

The premier said Ipperwash Provincial Park has remained occupied and unavailable to the public since 1995, when police moved in to evict native demonstrators and shot one dead.

The Liberals are waiting expectantly, because a judicial inquiry will soon rule whether Harris set off the chain of events by ordering police to evict them.

Health Minister and new Deputy Premier George Smitherman added that hospitals have problems because they suffered "under the Conservative torment of Mike Harris," who failed to tackle problems, and, going back more than a decade, under the NDP.

Elizabeth Witmer, a health minister under Harris, protested understandably that "after three years in government, it is time for the Liberals to stop blaming other parties for the problems that exist today."

Smitherman also quickly labeled Tory as having been a back-room politician, which raises suspicion the Liberals in an election will go even further back to 1993 and recall his most embarrassing moment.

Tory then chaired a campaign to re-elect prime minister Kim Campbell and in a giant lapse in taste ran TV commercials emphasizing Liberal leader Jean Chrétien's partial facial paralysis with a voice saying the speaker would be embarrassed if he became prime minister, and they were condemned and withdrawn.

Liberals would love to recall the incident in Tory's first general election as leader.

The Conservatives also quickly described McGuinty as a "serial promise-breaker," and he has broken promises.

But they have gall, because he made most as opposition leader when the Conservative government was claiming in a last bid to get re-elected that it had the province flush with money, while it hid a $5 billion deficit.

Some Conservatives will be itching to raise the issue of the rise of gays. McGuinty's government is the first to have ministers, Smitherman and new education minister Kathleen Wynne, who are not afraid to say they are gay.

The New Democrat MPPs now also include the winner of the vicious by-election, Cheri DiNovo, a United Church minister who performed the first legal same-sex marriage in Canada.

The Conservatives under Tory officially have accepted gays rights, including same-sex marriage, but some party members would love to picture themselves, as in previous elections, as the only supporters of family values.

Those are just some of the issues that could get nasty.