Caroline Mulroney, daughter of former PM, seeking Ontario PC nomination.
Caroline Mulroney, daughter of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, is making her entrance into politics — though she’s going the provincial route.
On Wednesday, Mulroney announced she’s seeking the Ontario Progressive Conservative nomination in the Toronto-area riding of York-Simcoe. She would be a star candidate for a party that’s been riding atop provincial polls since Patrick Brown was elected leader in 2015, aiming to end a decade and a half of Ontario Liberal rule.
“As a working mother of four, I know we need change,” the 43-year-old Mulroney says in a video announcing her candidacy. “Government needs to get out of the way, focus more on affordability, manage taxes properly so we get the services we expect.”
Mulroney has been making herself
OTTAWA — While Liberals and Conservatives trade accusations that they’re hurting Canada’s position in the imminent renegotiation of NAFTA, the Trudeau government has tapped the Tories’ former interim leader, Rona Ambrose, to help advise on the trilateral trade deal.
Ambrose is one of 13 members of a newly created advisory council on the North American Free Trade Agreement, announced Wednesday by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.
Other members include James Moore, a former minister in the previous Conservative government, and Brian Topp, a veteran NDP strategist, one-time NDP leadership contender and former chief of staff to Alberta’s NDP premier, Rachel Notley.
The membership is designed to demonstrate that the government is taking a unified, non-partisan, Team Canada approach to the negotiations, which are set to start more visible in party politics recently, including a stint co-hosting the federal Conservative leadership convention in May. Last fall she introduced Brown at a fundraising dinner.
“I have great confidence in Patrick Brown,” Mulroney told Postmedia’s Bradford Times. “He understands what people here want and care about.”
Mulroney has a home in Georgina, which is in the riding, and says she’s getting a sense of what local voters are looking for in the election scheduled for June 2018.
“From all the people I’ve spoken with, the people of York-Simcoe want change. People tell me that what matters to them is the rising cost of living – the cost of housing, hydro rates, taxes ... the affordability.”
The Ontario PCs have already gotten some advice from her father, who dropped by the Ontario legislature in April 2016 at Brown’s request to give some advice to the caucus on winning the next election.
Brown has previously said that he first decided he was a Conservative when, during grade school, he Aug. 16.
The council also includes representatives of various groups that have the most at stake in the negotiations, among them, Canadian Labour Congress president Hassan Yussuff; Linda Hasenfratz, CEO of automotive parts manufacturer Linamar Corp., and Marcel Groleau, president of Quebec’s union of agricultural producers.
Freeland also announced Wednesday the appointment of one of Canada’s foremost trade experts, Kirsten Hillman, as deputy ambassador to the United States, and three new trade-savvy consuls general to be located in Atlanta, Seattle and San Francisco.
“With the expansion of our consular presence in the United States and the creation of the NAFTA council, we are furthering Canada’s determination to promote Canadian interests and values in our bilateral relations with our main economic partner,” Freeland said in a written statement.
Other members of the council include Perry Bellegarde, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Mulroney about acid rain and got a response back. “I told my parents, ‘I think I agree with the Conservative party,’ ” he said in a 2015 Toronto Life interview.
Caroline Mulroney had long been rumoured to be considering a political run, though some speculated she might run federally. Her brother Mark, head of equity capital markets at the National Bank of Canada, had been talked about as a potential leadership candidate to replace Stephen Harper, though he stayed out. Her other brother, Ben, co-hosts a national morning program on CTV.
Caroline studied at Harvard College, has a law degree from New York University, and has a long resume of experience at investment firms and philanthropic organizations. She is currently a vice president at BloombergSen, a Toronto investment counselling firm, and is the co-founder and chair of the Shoebox Project for Shelters charity, which collects gifts for women and girls in shelters or facing homelessness.
If she wins the nomination, she’ll be running in a riding vacated by Annette Verschuren, former president of Home Depot, and Phyllis Yaffe, former chair of Cineplex Entertainment and CEO of Alliance Atlantis who is currently serving as Canada’s consul general in New York City.
The inclusion of Ambrose, who retired from politics in May, comes amid a squabble between Liberals and Conservatives over which party has done the most damage to Canada’s position in the U.S. just as NAFTA negotiations are about to begin.
The Liberals have accused the Tories of undermining Canada by savaging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the American media over his decision to compensate Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was imprisoned and tortured at the notorious U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after allegedly killing an American soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old.
Trudeau himself has chided the Conservatives for campaigning in the U.S. against the Khadr payment. long-time PC MPP Julia Munro, who is retiring. York-Simcoe, located just north of Toronto, has been easily won by Munro in each election since the riding was created in 2007, and Munro has held a seat in the legislature since 1995.
Mulroney has received endorsements from Munro and from Conservative MP Peter Van Loan, who holds the federal seat for the riding.
The party has been plagued by controversies over nominations recently, with numerous candidates alleging the party’s brass has been interfering to get its preferred choice and doesn’t take appeals seriously. The volunteer leadership in three riding associations have resigned in various protests, and other candidates are appealing the nomination process in court.
The nomination meeting for York-Simcoe isn’t scheduled until Sept. 10. Peter Seemann, the riding association nomination chair, said Mulroney is the only candidate to have formally declared so far, but others have expressed interest.
The Ontario Liberals and NDP have not yet nominated a candidate for the riding.
“When I deal with the United States, I leave the domestic squabbles at home. Other parties don’t seem to have that rule, but I think it’s one Canadians appreciate,” he said last month.
Newly minted Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has scoffed at suggestions the cross-border anti-Khadr campaign will rile Americans against Canada just as NAFTA talks get underway.
And the Tories have, in turn, accused Trudeau of hurting Canada’s position by giving an interview to Rolling Stone magazine, which featured a cover photo of the prime minister last week with the caption “Why can’t he be our president?” Conservatives have said the article amounts to poking mercurial U.S. President Donald Trump in the eye.
“Why does Mr. Trudeau need to do this right now, when it does put in danger the direction and the commencement of these negotiations?” deputy Conservative leader Lisa Raitt told the Globe and Mail.
The Prime Minister’s Office has called that accusation “absurd.”
MONTREAL — Quebec’s English-speaking community has grown more in the past five years than during any census period over the last four decades, says the executive vicepresident of the Association for Canadian Studies.
Census data from 2016 that was released Wednesday shows the percentage of Quebecers whose first official language spoken is English increased to 14.4 per cent from 13.5 per cent between 2011 and 2016.
While immigration data from the census has not yet been released, Jack Jedwab said the increase in Quebec’s anglophone population is likely due to more immigration as well as fewer people leaving the province for other parts of Canada.
“I think we can safely assume, if we look at historic trends, that when there is political and economic stability, the out-migration from Quebec diminishes,” he said. “That, combined with immigration, are probably the two factors that explain why we see this growth in English speakers.
“This is the most significant increase of any five-year census report we’ve seen in the last 40 years.”
English as a mother tongue increased in Quebec to 9.6 per cent last year from nine per cent in 2011, while English as a language spoken at home rose to 19.8 per cent from 18.3 per cent over the same period. First official language is defined by Statistics Canada as a citizen’s primary language between English and French.
The agency defines mother tongue as a citizen’s first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual.
While anglophones might be more numerous in Quebec, the director general of an organization that links more than 50 English-language community groups in the province says services in the language are still lacking.
“We still worry about our schools,” said Sylvia Martin-Laforge of the Quebec Community Groups Network. “And we also worry about the quality of services to the English-speaking community in health care.”
Quebec’s strict language laws, which bar francophones from attending English-language schools, are a major reason why English school board attendance is falling, she said.
She added that anglophone parents are also increasingly choosing to school their children in French, while speaking English at home.
What would give a significant boost to anglophone institutions, MartinLaforge added, is if the government permitted immigrants from British Commonwealth countries who moved to Quebec to attend English schools.