PC hopefuls tiptoe with Ontario vote winnable
Set out to show they’re not dumb in first debate
When Richard Nixon quit the presidency over Watergate more than 40 years ago he still had the support of 24 per cent of Americans. Yet it was enough to convince him to forfeit the world’s most powerful political position.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne now stands seven points below that trough. A survey released this week found she has the approval of just 17 per cent of the population, below three of the best-known Progressive Conservative candidates, all of whom met for their first debate Thursday to win the chance to challenge Wynne in June’s election. A full 69 per cent of Ontarians don’t like the job Wynne has done. So deep is their distaste for the Liberal regime that PC fortunes have actually risen in the wake of the abuse scandal that forced opposition leader Patrick Brown’s hurried resignation three weeks ago.
It’s as if fate, feeling bad about the Tories’ total inability to mount a credible campaign in three previous winnable elections, has stacked the deck so high that only a complete ignoramus could possibly bumble it away again. So on Thursday afternoon, four PC leadership candidates gathered on stage to confront one another in hopes of proving they’re not that dumb.
So extraordinary is the atmosphere surrounding the leadership race that the contestants — Caroline Mulroney, Christine Elliott, Doug Ford and late entry Tanya Granic Allen — were at the same time competing for attention with Brown’s ongoing onslaught against the allegations confronting him. The morning of the debate, the press was full of interviews with Brown and various figures in the scandal, effectively opening holes in the claims made by two anonymous women against Brown.
One of the accusers was forced to admit a key part of her story was wrong: she wasn’t underage at the time she had said Brown had tried getting physical with her, nor was she still in high school, an admission that quickly raised questions about the reliability of the rest of her story. Counter-observers immediately filled Twitter feeds with indignant complaints that Brown was mounting a well-organized public effort to discredit his accusers, as if defending himself was a violation of some unwritten code. The former leader also said his resignation letter was sent in without his permission. And that he’s suing CTV for airing the abuse allegations.
In the face of all this, Elliott, Mulroney, Ford and Granic Allen strove to outpoint one another without undermining the overall goal, which is finding a leader able to defeat Wynne’s Liberals. They appeared to be united in their appreciation that the crucial task is not to make a mistake, or to hand the Liberals a club to beat them with. The overriding task, stressed Elliott, a former deputy leader and widow of the late finance minister Jim Flaherty, was to choose a leader who could defeat the Liberals. “We have to select a leader who can win,” she emphasized. “We need to win.”
To that end they avoided attacking one another, with the occasional exception of Granic Allen, the feistiest and least-known of the candidates, who entered the race Tuesday and was mad keen to denounce Liberal sex-ed policies and the “corruption” of the ousted Brown. For the other three, differentiating themselves from one another may be among the tougher tasks of the abbreviated contest, which ends barely two weeks from now. Ford and Elliott are family friends going back years; Mulroney addressed them as “Doug” and “Christine” and stressed that she’s a loyal Tory, not a raging, swamp-clearing outsider.
They all agreed they hate Wynne’s carbon tax. They all agreed the Liberals like dictating policies from on high rather than consulting Ontarians. They share deep concerns about the lack of adequate preparation for marijuana legalization. They all think the sex-education curriculum was pushed through with undue consultation, and they all say the Liberals’ rush to hike the minimum wage was a last-minute strategy to win votes that will damage small businesses. Mulroney said she’d delay 2019’s scheduled $1 increase, substituting annual hikes of 25 cents over four years. Ford said he’d cancel the increase but cut taxes to zero for the lowest wage earners.
Ford — directly challenged by host Steve Paikin on whether a Ford government would be a repeat of the mayoral chaos of his brother Rob — came across as more restrained and reasoned than his reputation would suggest. Like Mulroney and Elliott he maintained he could easily find billions of dollars in savings to pay for promises in the party platform, even without the carbon-tax revenue that was the original basis for the promises. “In a $140-billion budget, do you think we can find two or three per cent?” Ford said.
Perhaps most anticipated was the debut of Mulroney, a prime minister’s daughter, who expected to be running as a rookie legislator and suddenly found herself contending to lead the party. Though she stumbled a bit in explaining how she’d cover the cost of a tax cut should the province hit a downturn, for the most part she presented as an intelligent, composed and thoughtful person, whose main drawback is her lack of experience. When challenged on the point, she was quick with the obvious response, that 14 years of “experienced” government by Wynne and Wynne’s predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, leaves little to recommend it.
“I know what people want,” she said. “They don’t want a career politician.”
Ontarians may not, but at this point the candidates are primarily worried about winning over party members, not the province as a whole. Elliott remains the most experienced of the candidates, a fact evident in the depth of policy detail she offered. Tories may well decide she’s the safest pair of hands to go up against the machine the Liberals will throw at them once the election race begins. Mulroney shows promise, but two weeks remains a short time to convince the party to trust her not to blow their long-awaited shot at governing.
If the polls are correct, Ontarians won’t need much persuading to give the party a chance. For now, the candidates can be satisfied they did nothing to disqualify themselves in their initial foray.