Next PC leader needs to edge party to centre to beat Grits, pollsters say
Whoever wins the leadership of the Ontario PC party on Saturday will have to move the party closer to the centre to topple the Liberals in 2018, pollsters say.
More than 76,000 Tory members were eligible to vote in their ridings over the past week, and the results will be announced Saturday at a Toronto-area convention centre. The race is down to just two entrants: Christine Elliott, MPP for Whitby-Oshawa, and Patrick Brown, MP for Barrie.
“The broader electorate in Ontario is extremely centrist,” said Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research, in an interview. He said there is “virtually no difference” in how either Elliott or Brown polls against Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne in the surveys his company has conducted.
“There’s not enough to win at the edges on the left or the right in Ontario,” he said, adding whoever wins will have to fight the Liberals for space in the centre.
The race began when Tim Hudak resigned his post as leader in June 2014 after losing the general election, partly because the Liberals and public-sector unions were so successful in portraying him as too extreme for Ontario in two election campaigns.
The new leader will also have to rebuild ties in the party, which has been divided by a campaign insiders say is too close to call. One Tory called it a “disappointing” race, and many concede the essentially 10-month campaign was too long.
Just this week the majority of caucus — most of whom are supporting Elliott — wore pink to Queen’s Park to protest a Brown supporter’s attack on the candidate as trying to build a “Big Pink Tent,” which was intended to say Elliott was trying to be a soft shade of Liberal, but which many inferred as a homophobic remark given the sex education controversy.
John Wright, a senior vice-president with Ipsos Reid, said the Liberals are about “as far left as they can get” in Ontario, even further left than the NDP, led by Andrea Horwath.
He suggested that if Elliott won — which would mark a historic first where all three party leaders in the country’s largest province are women — she could better position the party to beat Wynne.
“Apples to apples, Christine Elliott is more likely to win (in a general election) because she is a left-of-centre Tory and it fits ... Three women leaders ... not Hudak,” he said.
Brown’s organizational skills have proved remarkable and could serve the party well, Wright said, since he has done such a good job connecting with ethnic communities that the party needs in the GTA. That allowed the essentially unknown MP to surge into contention and claim in February he signed tens of thousands of new members. Yet Brown, and MPP Monte McNaughton, who left the leadership race to endorse him, could have handed the Liberals some ammunition, Wright said. Their expressed opposition to the new sex ed curriculum in Ontario and some of Brown’s past support of socially conservative issues — including pro-life and anti-gay marriage comments made in federal Parliament — could allow the Liberals to frame him as too conservative for Ontario.
“The Liberals … will quickly paint his wagon as a social conservative. They’ll paint him as worse than Hudak was,” Wright said.
“I don’t think our next Ontario poll, we’re going to see suddenly the Tories jump a lot in their standings,” Bozinoff said. “I don’t think either one of them is going to be a game changer.”