Tories forced to retrench in race for must-win seats
As an indication of how Patrick Brown ran the Progressive Conservatives — from recruiting candidates to honouring the grassroots to dealing with controversy — the fiasco of the Ottawa West-Nepean nomination process is depressing.
The one-time candidate, Karma Macgregor, was one of two casualties — the other in Scarborough Centre — in a purge by the Tories’ central nominations committee, which re-examined controversies involving some candidates chosen when Brown was the party leader.
In Ottawa West-Nepean, Brown personally confirmed Macgregor’s nomination despite allegations from the Tories’ own local riding association president that the ballot boxes had been stuffed and the membership rolls contained dozens and dozens of suspicious entries, people with Toronto phone numbers, living in apartment buildings without apartment numbers, and so on. Bygones, Brown shrugged.
He appointed her the party’s candidate, exercising a power he had to bypass ordinary nominations before his party deposed him in January amid allegations of sexual assault and creepiness. The riding association board quit and retired senator Marjory LeBreton said publicly she’d never seen anything so undemocratic.
It didn’t help the look of things that Macgregor’s daughter Tamara was one of Brown’s deputy chiefs of staff, herself ejected from the leader’s office after Brown resigned.
We’re redoing the vote, the nominations committee co-chair (and former Progressive Conservative party president) Ken Zeise announced last week.
The party hasn’t set a date yet, but Macgregor’s disappearance from social media seems to leave the field to Jeremy Roberts.
The Tories had wanted to give their candidate a head start. Ottawa WestNepean is a prime Tory target, the kind of inner-suburb swing riding the Progressive Conservatives have to win if they’re going to form a government.
When Mike Harris was leading the party, Tory Garry Guzzo won it; since the Tories have been on the outs, it’s been held by Liberals Jim Watson and Bob Chiarelli.
Chiarelli’s been the Liberals’ energy minister a couple of times, which means he’s a lightning rod for anger over electricity prices. Plus he was implicated in the government’s cashfor-access scandal, serving as a featured guest at dinners where energy companies and lobbyists paid the Liberal party big money to attend.
Defeating Kathleen Wynne in her own riding on their way to power might be the only thing that would make Tories cheer louder than forcing Chiarelli into retirement.
But he’s an experienced politician. Their best chance there — like anywhere — would come with a rooted local candidate, someone whose name meant something in west Ottawa.
Roberts is a Conservative apparatchik, a staffer to federal ministers in the Harper era who held on with a British Columbia MP when the federal Tories lost the 2015 election.
After he “lost” the Ottawa WestNepean nomination he announced he’d run federally in KanataCarleton, the next riding west. Now, he’s back provincially in Ottawa West-Nepean.
Politics has been his career. He is, at least, an Ottawa guy, and while Macgregor is hiding, he’s out selling memberships.
Wave elections can bring the most unlikely people into office. But this is how a party might treat a safe seat, where backroom intrigue is how you get to the legislature. In a constituency where your party needs every advantage, it’s pure selfdestruction.