Caroline Mulroney gives more than gets from PCs

Job 1 for the Progressive Conservative party’s new star candidate is proving she belongs in the riding she wants to represent, so Caroline Mulroney is talking to reporters in York-Simcoe only for at least the next month, her spokesperson said Thursday.

Mulroney has degrees from Harvard and New York University and she’s a lawyer who’s made her career in investment banking. At 43 she’s not a titan of finance, perhaps, but she brings Bay Street credibility, international experience and a bit of glamour to a party whose caucus is dominated by people whose résumés are more likely to include words like “reeve” than “Esq.”

She co-founded a charity with her three brothers’ wives, Project Shoebox, that donates kits of toiletries and similar essentials to women staying in shelters.

The Progressive Conservatives have good candidates, knowledgeable candidates, accomplished candidates (like activist Merrilee Fullerton in Kanata-Carleton and finance executive Peter Bethlenfalvy in Pickering). As Caroline Smith, she’d fit right in with them. But as the daughter of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, Caroline Mulroney brings more to the Tory party than the Tory party gives her. So, why Ontario provincial politics? “She feels strongly that the things that really matter to people is their affordability, health care, education, hydro, and jobs. These matters are directly impacted by the decisions made at Queen’s Park,” spokesperson Rebecca Grundy said in an email.

Mulroney got to know party Leader Patrick Brown when he helped collect donations for the Shoebox Project, Grundy said, and believes in him.

Beyond her résumé and name, Mulroney brings things to the party Brown will find valuable. He was a solid social conservative as a federal MP who’s now adamant he’s a bigtent centrist and nobody knows for sure whether to believe him. Mulroney gave money to federal Conservative leadership candidate Lisa Raitt, arguably the most socially liberal of the serious contenders to succeed Stephen Harper. Rightwingers were so dissatisfied with Brian Mulroney as prime minister that they walked out of his party and founded their own.

The Liberals welcomed Mulroney to active politics by having a Simcoearea councillor passive-aggressively welcome her to York-Simcoe, implying she’s a carpetbagger who will of course learn to love the place she’s parachuted into. It’s an obvious attack, but not necessarily unfair.

Julia Munro, the riding’s Progressive Conservative MPP, announced on March 21 she’d retire at the next election. Mulroney and her husband Andrew, the financier son of New York writer and editor Lewis Lapham, bought a place on the shore of Lake Simcoe in the spring and are renovating it, Grundy said.

“Their family has always been wanting to eventually be finding a place up there,” Grundy said. (Grundy herself is a former Brown adviser turned lobbyist for a Toronto consulting firm.)

If Mulroney wins a seat at Queen’s Park, she’ll work in Toronto four days a week when the legislature is sitting, probably living in a condo, and commute north for weekends as Munro has, Grundy added.

In the meantime, they’ve got their house in Toronto. Public information from Elections Canada shows Mulroney has given an address in wealthy Forest Hill when she’s donated to the federal Conservative Party during the past several years.

If she were to run there, she’d be up against Health Minister Eric Hoskins in a riding that’s voted firmly for Liberals since it was created in 1999. York-Simcoe, is a much, much better bet.

Once she shows that she belongs there.