INTRIGUE CONSUMES RIDING CAMPAIGN
Tory divisions over Patrick Brown straining efforts at party unity
The provincial Liberal candidate in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell is a former Tory who quit the party because of the way Patrick Brown ran it. He’s now being helped by another former Tory who quit the party because of the way Doug Ford is running it.
Most places, with power in sight, the Progressive Conservatives are putting a really brave face on in the name of party unity. In this riding, not so much.
Rachel Theriault, a Progressive Conservative volunteer who’d been working for Tory candidate Amanda Simard, left the campaign noisily on Thursday night, with an open letter.
“In the long run, I have decided to support the best local candidate, which is in my opinion, Liberal candidate Pierre Leroux. I regret any inconvenience this may cause, however I must remain true to my values and integrity … which leaves me no other option,” she wrote.
Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, which extends from rural east Ottawa to the Quebec border, has been Liberal territory in provincial politics since the 1980s, but not always by huge margins. Voters picked Conservative Pierre Lemieux federally when Stephen Harper was winning national elections. With incumbent Liberal MPP Grant Crack leaving politics, the provincial Tories have their best chance at a win there in a long time.
(The field includes the New Democrats’ Bonnie Jean-Louis, who did the best any NDP candidate in Glengarry-PrescottRussell ever has two elections ago, but still finished third with under 15 per cent of the vote.)
Simard answered an email asking for an interview with a written statement:
“Rachel Theriault was not a member of my campaign team,” it said. “There were some initial discussions about having her on the team but we later decided she would not have been a good fit due to her behaviour. With that decision, we took steps last month to ensure she had no access to any party data. To be clear, Rachel has never actually worked on this campaign team.”
Theriault shared messages from Simard and others to prove her involvement in the Tory effort. In one, dated in March, a party techsupport person helps her fix her access to the Tories’ voter-tracking database, a closely guarded resource.
Leroux welcomed Theriault’s support. “She called me last night, essentially told me she wrote a letter. I haven’t read it yet,” he said. His campaign manager was to meet her to see whether she could contribute to his campaign.
Both Simard and Leroux are members of the Russell Township council: Simard’s a councillor, Leroux’s the mayor.
Theriault’s father, Ronald, ran against Leroux four years ago and Theriault managed her father’s campaign. They’ve known each other a long time, he said.
Simard became the Progressive Conservative candidate a year-and-a-half ago after the party disqualified her rival, Derek Duval, on the eve of a nomination meeting. Duval said the party objected to a homemade “mockumentary” he helped make at a charity hockey tournament, and specifically one shot showing a player using a hockey stick to eat poutine that, because it was a brownish glob with a string of cheese dangling from it, was taken for a hamster.
Duval alleged at the time that Brown’s clique favoured Simard and the video was just a pretext to eject him from the race. Tory party central only ever said Duval had failed ordinary vetting.
Whatever the wisdom of that decision was, the party got Simard amid a bunch of bad feelings.
Then, just weeks ago, Crack bowed out even though he’d accepted the Liberal nomination in January. The Liberals quickly recruited Leroux to replace him.
The Tories put out word that Leroux had wanted Simard dumped from the Tory nomination so he could have it and quit to join the Liberals out of pique. No, no, Leroux said, he thinks Simard is a bad candidate, but he wasn’t after her nomination. He is a former Tory, he says, but left the party over the way it treated Duval.
“Pierre Leroux is not being truthful here, he absolutely called me and asked that I intervene to make him PC candidate,” said Fred DeLorey, a longtime conservative activist now working as the Progressive Conservatives’ director of field operations.
Anyway, the way Theriault tells it, her disillusionment with the Tories began with ex-leader’s Patrick Brown’s ouster in January, amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving two women (allegations Brown denies and is suing over). In her resignation letter, she calls it “the coup that was done to Patrick Brown by members of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.”
She’s not alone in that. A vocal faction in the party denounces people like interim leader Vic Fedeli and Eastern Ontario MPPs Lisa MacLeod and Randy Hillier, who stomped out the last sparks of Brown’s comeback attempt, as a “coup crew.”
Brown’s writing a book about it, he announced the other day; his publisher released an excerpt that said his ouster last January was “a sensational political assassination the likes of which haven’t been seen since Julius Caesar.”
(The publisher recanted the line hours later, saying it had been edited out of the final draft.)
“I believe that (Brown) should have been given the right to prove his innocence instead of being left to the wayside without support,” Theriault says. “Then as his closest advisers and supporters were being fired from the party, including the best francophone outreach person the party had ever had, it became abundantly clear that things were changing.”
That francophone outreach person is Roxane Villeneuve, daughter of former Tory MPP Noble Villeneuve, which makes her Eastern Ontario conservative royalty. She ran in Glen garry Prescott-Russell in 2014 and lost to Crack. Fedeli eliminated her job when he took over the leader’s office.
Theriault says her frustration grew quickly once Leroux became the Liberal candidate and the Tory campaign asked her to cut him out of her life.
“I have known Pierre for over 20 years in the community,” she says. “Our oldest children are the same age and at one point enjoyed playing together. Then when I was asked to take out any information I may have against Pierre, I refused. I made it clear at that time I do not engage in dirty politics.”
She thought about it for a while and decided that, actually, Leroux will make a better MPP, she says, so she’s gone over to him.
All this intrigue is in just one riding. The Tories are going to be getting over Patrick Brown for a long, long time.