Why Christine Elliott is doing this — AGAIN
As Ontario Progressive Conservative party members begin voting to choose a new leader, we will profile the four candidates over the coming days. The leader will be announced March 10.
As they read the ridings out, and the news got worse and worse, Christine Elliott, Ontario’s perennial premier- inwaiting, sat in the front row of the Toronto Congress Centre, and somehow kept her smile. Her triplets, Galen, John and Quinn, started to crack as the day wore on — but even after a brutal 10-month campaign, and just a year after losing her husband, Elliott kept most of the sadness and surprise inside. In picture, it’s there only in her eyes.
Elliott had entered her second bid for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario as the overwhelming favourite in 2015. She won the support of the lion’s share of caucus. She raised the most money and worked with a who’s who of conservative organizers. And yet, she didn’t just lose to Patrick Brown, then a little-known MP, she was wiped out. “It was pretty shocking to me, and my entire team,” Elliott said recently.
After the final results were read, Elliott walked up to the stage to concede and call for unity. Then she slipped out of the hall, and, for the first time in 20 years, from the public gaze.
But on Feb. 1, Elliott jumped unexpectedly back into politics with a bid to replace Brown. She is 62 and running for the same job for the third time in nine years. Elliott has by far the most experience of the four candidates. But this will be no coronation. “She’s in a tougher race this time,” said Greg Lyle, the owner of Innovative Research, a polling firm with deep Tory ties. “Patrick was a relative unknown. Given her existing brand, she should have been able to win. She’s now up against two very strong brands (in Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney.)”
But whether she can win is only one question. Why she wants to win at all is another. With her experience and connections, Elliott could do a dozen things presumably more enjoyable and definitively more lucrative than running another grinding leadership campaign. So why do it all again? There are several answers, and they are all rooted in Elliott’s own story.
Elliott was raised in the riding she ultimately represented. She studied law at the University of Western Ontario, was called to the bar in 1980, and spent her early career working as a lawyer in Toronto. She met her future husband, Jim Flaherty, when she joined his firm, a small civil litigation outfit that specialized in insurance law. The two were married in 1986. In 1989, after Elliott’s father died, they moved back to Whitby and founded their own firm, Flaherty, Dow, Elliott and McCarthy.
Elliott recently sold the 19th century stone farmhouse she and Flaherty bought and renovated in Whitby. She now lives in a converted coach house in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood with two of her sons. If she does become Premier, she said, she’ll be able to walk to Queen’s Park, a nice change from the years of commuting back and forth up the 401.
Elliott has often said that she, not Flaherty, was supposed to be the first one in the family to run for office. But Flaherty put his name in first. And after an unsuccessful run for the PCs in 1990, he broke through in the Mike Harris wave of 1995.
Elliott might have run in that election herself, but in 1991 she gave birth to the family’s three sons. As an infant, one of the boys, John, was hospitalized for what doctors later decided was encephalitis. He suffered permanent damage from the illness and was significantly developmentally delayed as a result. After his diagnosis, Elliott became, and remains, a fierce advocate for the rights and services of both children and adults with special needs.
When asked why she’s getting back into politics, she sleepwalked through several talking points before launching into an urgent, detailed critique of services available in Ontario for adults who age out of the youth disabilities system.
“Helping people find work, to find safe, clean housing, to be able to have a life like everybody else is really important to me,” she said.
Today, John Flaherty volunteers at the Abilities Centre in Whitby, a facility Elliott and Jim Flaherty were instrumental in setting up. An avid runner, he hopes to become a personal trainer. Quinn graduated from the Richard Ivey School of Business; Galen is a second-year law student at Osgoode Hall. As he did in 2015, Galen is also helping out on his mother’s campaign. He accompanied her to an interview with National Post.
Elliott’s own political career took off when Jim Flaherty, who served for 11 years as the MPP for Whitby- Ajax and eventually as provincial finance minister, left for federal office in 2006. Elliott ran in his place and won a byelection in March of that year. She joined a PC caucus then led by John Tory.
At Queen’s Park, Elliott developed a reputation as a biting critic on health care, social services and the legal system. She also routinely reached across the aisle to work on issues of common interest with other parties, including mental health care and bullying.
In 2018, her political style — collaborative, generally moderate and results- oriented — can seem like a throwback to another, almost unrecognizable world. But she insists that, even in a time of Breitbarts, Rebels and Donald Trump, there’s still an appetite for politicians like her. “I think that when people elect their representatives, they expect them to go work and work on the problems that are facing Ontario families,” she said. “And that involves all three parties working together.”
Elliot’s family has long been close with that of her rival, Doug Ford. Flaherty and Doug Ford Sr. served together in Queen’s Park. Her son Galen worked at Doug Ford’s City Hall office in the summer of 2011. And the Fords, Rob and Doug both, canvassed for her in 2015. But friendship only goes so far. For one thing, Ford and Elliott have distinctly different visions of what it means to be a conservative in 2018. “My view of conservatism is what is practical and what is reasonable,” Elliott said. “The populist campaign is one that really likes to simplify things and to say that we need to find ways to cut government.”
Elliott ran for leader for the first time after Tory stepped down in 2009. Some considered her the front-runner when that race began, but she finished third. She served as deputy leader to Tim Hudak, however, as well as the party’s health critic, and by 2014 she was again considered a prominent candidate. But in April of that year, Flaherty suffered a massive heart attack in his Ottawa apartment. His political protégé, Kellie Leitch, an orthopedic surgeon, was the first to reach him. She performed CPR, but it was too late. Flaherty died on April 10. He was 64.
Elliott stayed in that race and won her seat. But the Tories lost again, badly. Hudak soon stepped down, leaving Elliott with a difficult choice. In just over two months she had lost her husband and an election. She’d had no time to decompress or grieve. And now she had to decide whether to jump into yet another leadership campaign. “I probably shouldn’t have done it,” she said in 2016.
Looking back, Elliott thinks Flaherty’s death did have an impact on that campaign. “I didn’t think so at the time,” she said. “But it was something of a distraction. People were very kind wherever we went and expressed their condolences, which was lovely. But it did sometimes take me off my central message.”
The general consensus among PC organizers and insiders, though, is that Elliott and her team were simply outstrategized. They built a massive early lead; they dominated the “air war” for media coverage. But on the ground, Brown proved indefatigable. “By and large, we were outhustled by Patrick,” said John Capobianco, Elliott’s campaign co- chair in 2015. Brown called more members. He went to more events. He tied up more crucial organizers in the Tamil, Sikh and Hindu communities in the GTA.
Some insiders still blame Elliott for that loss, saying she was never fully engaged in the campaign. Others think her team, made up of big name, established conservatives, let her down. Regardless, those who are with her this time insist she won’t get beat the same way again.
When Brown stepped down, amid a caucus revolt, many now in the Elliott camp were initially leaning toward Vic Fedeli. Most of Brown’s senior team coalesced around Mulroney, while many influential social conservatives jumped in with Ford. Two sources close to Elliott say they don’t think she would have entered the race had Fedeli stayed in. He supported her in 2015 and they remain close. But once he decided to stay on as interim leader, the opening was there, and Elliott leapt for it.
This race will be very different from the 10- month slog of 2015. Still, Elliott’s team says they have absorbed several lessons from that race. ( She has also signed up several Brown organizers, including Jim Burnett, his 2015 director of operations.)
For the first month, they focused on the “ground war.” They kept Elliott on the phone with organizers and members, and ran her through a punishing slate of daily events across the province, aiming to sign up as many new members as possible before the membership cutoff on Feb. 16. Now, they’ll aim to have her in front of more cameras, while also keeping up the phone work and travel.
The reality is, that for now, no one, in any camp, really has a good idea how the race will play out. The party’s existing membership list is a mess and the timeline to sign up new voters is unbelievably, historically tight.
As for Elliott, she is selling herself as an experienced leader. “I was there for nine years,” she said. “I know Queen’s Park.”
Since December 2015, she has been on a political sabbatical, as Ontario’s first Patient Ombudsman.
But the break is now over. “I’m refreshed and ready to go,” she said. “It’s a very different campaign this time.”