Time for Patrick Brown to get down to business
Ontario Tory Leader Patrick Brown spent this week rolling out a set-piece announcement a day about things he’ll do if he can hold the Progressive Conservative party together long enough to win an election next year.
It gave conservatives something to talk about other than the meat-grinder of the party’s nomination process, which keeps splatting out bloody messes.
The legislature isn’t sitting and Premier Kathleen Wynne has mostly been on holiday since Canada Day, with just a trip to Rhode Island this week to join a conference of American state governors. The field here at home has been open for Brown to practise for next year’s campaign. The theme: “It’s time for real change for the better.”
Monday in Essex County, Brown promised to look out for greenhouse farmers in his yetunspecified climate-change plan.
Tuesday in St. Thomas, he met parents of kids with autism to boast about having pushed the Liberals into funding treatment programs.
Wednesday in Toronto, he promised to cut the pay of executives in the hydro sector.
Thursday in Limoges, he promised to give the auditor general back her power to veto government advertising for being too partisan, an authority the Liberals took away.
And Friday, back in Toronto, in front of the legislature and stacks of prop hundred-dollar bills, he promised to bar cabinet ministers from raising political donations from people in industries they oversee.
He’s been going around with his sleeves rolled up and his collar undone, just the way Dalton McGuinty did when he campaigned, though Brown wears a blue tie instead of a red one.
The actual promises are pennyante but that’s not the point. An election tour takes skill to execute. The Tories have the top of their team in place (led by Andrew Boddington, who most recently worked on Kevin O’Leary’s shooting-star campaign to lead the federal Conservatives) and putting it through its paces early is a good idea. Besides the policy stuff, Brown held town halls, ran some hockey drills with a Belleville junior team, took part in community roundtables.
“I hope we can start pointing our guns outward,” a Tory MPP told me this week, hopeful that having hired people whose only task is to prepare for next spring’s campaign will help.
But, well, it hasn’t yet. Brown and the team are still knee-deep in angry would-be candidates alleging they’ve been victimized by rigged or sloppy nomination votes. The latest is in Scarborough Centre, where apparently the party wasn’t ready for a crush of voters (normally a good problem to have), couldn’t get them processed in time and nobody’s quite sure what happened to the ballot boxes.
The party picked political novice Thenusha Parani to run against Liberal minister Brad Duguid, who’s won four elections in a row with outright majorities. The CBC quotes the riding’s last Progressive Conservative MPP, Mike Harris cabinet minister Marilyn Mushinski, saying the nomination meeting was a mess and, worse: “I think it would be an absolute disaster if Patrick Brown became the next premier of the province.” Oy. Meanwhile, the Liberals are gleefully passing around an affidavit filed by Progressive Conservative party president Rick Dykstra in a court battle over another nomination fight, this one in Hamilton. Brown just cast aside the results of a contested nomination meeting, would-be candidate Vikram Singh complains.
“The Nomination Meeting is not determinative of who will ultimately be listed on the ballot as the PC Party candidate in a general election,” Dykstra’s affidavit says. The leader ultimately decides. Which is completely true. But not a great look for a party that boasts about its open nominations, devotion to grassroots organizing, and allergy to decrees from the leader’s office.
The Liberals, of course, are soon to have senior officials (including Wynne confidante, organizer and former deputy chief of staff Patricia Sorbara) go on trial for allegedly trying to bribe an inconvenient candidate out of a nomination race in Sudbury, and then other senior figures (including former McGuinty chief of staff David Livingston) go on trial for allegedly criminal mishandling of public documents. The Tories’ fights do not, so far, involve search warrants.
But when Tory riding-association boards in swing ridings are quitting, former cabinet ministers are calling the leader a disaster, and elements of the base are wandering off to join fringe parties, all is not well.
These are growing pains, a different Progressive Conservative MPP proposes. Brown carved his way up to the leadership of a hollowed-out and demoralized party, putting in the work to beat the presumptive favourite, Christine Elliott, in a riding-by-riding vote. That required a tremendous work ethic and a particular set of skills. But holding together an inherently fractious coalition of social conservatives, libertarians and Bay Street types while convincing centrist suburbanites to go blue, too, requires another set and Brown is still acquiring them, the argument goes.
Maybe. Here’s another possible explanation: Maybe Patrick Brown is just not that great a politician. His triumphs since his leadership win have been few — two notable byelection wins that took seats from Liberals, one of them marred by Brown’s flopping around on sex education in schools like a fish in a boat. The nomination battles are getting messier, not cleaner. That Dykstra affidavit says that when Brown appointed a candidate in that Hamilton squabble, the point was to smother the noise.
Ontario needs and deserves a competent alternative to the Liberals in 2018. The Liberals are as vulnerable now as they’ve been since 2003 but they won’t lie meekly down while Brown learns. dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreevely