BROWN TRIES TO MAKE LIBERALS LOOK LIKE ONTARIO’S RIGHT-WING BAD GUYS
Ontarians should not only disapprove of Quebec’s new face-coverings law, the government should find a legal case to support to get it struck down, Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown says, continuing to harry the Liberal party from the left.
They keep saying he’s a frightening right-winger and he keeps refusing to play along. Brown criticizes the governing party not for being bleeding-heart incompetents, which they’re used to and know how to answer, but for letting screw-ups compound their meanness. That’s unfamiliar, uncomfortable ground for people who are used to thinking of themselves as the party of building Ontario up.
We’ll start with Quebec’s Bill 62, which is purportedly about enforcing secularism in the public sphere but which will, in practice, mainly tell niqab-wearing Muslim women they have to take their veils off to ride city buses or go to school. Unusually, all the parties in the legislature Thursday agreed to make time to condemn another province’s new law.
“This legislation would disproportionately affect women who are sometimes already at the margins and push them into further isolation. These are people that you and I know,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said, leading off. “They are our neighbours: the grandmother who, if she lived in Quebec, would no longer be able to drop off her granddaughter at a city-run daycare, or a mother who would not be able to bring her children to a hospital to see the doctor. That is not the kind of society that we stand for in Ontario.”
“My leader has often said it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter who you love, it doesn’t matter how much you make, and it doesn’t matter where you worship; you have a home here, in the province of Ontario, and we respect you,” agreed Ottawa Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod, speaking for her party. “All Canadians have a legal right to their religious beliefs, including in the province of Quebec.”
But, she said, and Brown echoed her Friday, Ontario should go beyond shaking its head grimly.
“I would also ask that our government seek leave to intervene in any charter challenge on the constitutionality of this bill. I think that we must stand against it and stand firmly against it,” MacLeod said.
This followed last week’s social-issues kerfuffle, when Brown wanted to hurry a Liberal-designed ban on abortion-clinic protests into law faster than the Liberals did.
The provincial Tories are light on actual policy, but in the twoand-a-half years Brown has been their leader, he’s racked up a list of implicit promises through the criticisms he and his party have launched against the government.
The biggie is that electricity should be cheaper and the companies that provide it should be publicly owned. That’s popular, mainstream Ontario opinion, and also pretty socialist.
Brown (though he’s warring with his party base over this and who knows how it’ll turn out) supports pricing carbon emissions to fight climate change but he’s against the system of tradable permits the Liberals have set up. Cap-and-trade used to be the conservative way of tackling climate change because it sets targets and lets businesses work out how to meet them. The market rewards companies that do it well.
Our system is linked with one Quebec and California built when Arnold Schwarzenegger was the state’s Republican governor, which creates a freetrade zone for carbon permits. Brown criticizes it because it “sends millions of dollars to one of the richest jurisdictions on earth for emission reductions there, which means failing to cut emissions here at home.” Well, that’s how trade works: we pay someone else to cut carbon emissions because they can do it more cheaply than we can. For conservatives, this is a feature, not a bug.
The Liberals are pushing school boards to close schools that are half-empty, as many as 600 of them, to save money; the Tories want to keep them open. The Tories criticize the Liberals for not spending enough on autism therapy, on mental health, on home care, on doctors. They fret about conditions in Ontario jails, that the government hasn’t done enough to get mining started in the Ring of Fire mineral deposits in the north.
Against all this, the Liberals accuse Patrick Brown of being a “Trump-style” politician for putting together ordinary attack ads and scour his record as a federal Conservative backbencher. Which is, to be sure, replete with socially conservative votes and mailers.
Brown has repudiated a lot of the things he used to stand for, which at best makes you ask whether he believes in the things he says. But he has repudiated them, directly and firmly, no sly wink-wink lines. He’s marched in gay-pride parades and supported the Liberals on sex education, at considerable cost to his grassroots support.
The Liberals are setting themselves up to run against Tim Hudak and his Million Jobs Plan and his Stephen Harper Conservative friends, repeating the 2014 campaign. The Patrick Brown we’ve seen so far is not that enemy. He’s not the gentler Tim Hudak of 2011, not even the centrist John Tory of 2007. He’s making the Liberals explain the things they’ve cut, the programs they haven’t funded, the injustices they’re not fighting hard enough.
Maybe the Tory platform, assuming there is one, will follow a different philosophy. But in the meantime, Brown’s an oddity these Liberals have never seen before and don’t yet know how to deal with. dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreevely