Christine Elliott may be the right leader with the wrong policies
It’s not just a future premier that Ontario’s Tories are choosing in this week’s leadership vote.
The Progressive Conservatives are trying to rewrite history, reverse policies, and recast themselves as a party reconnected to their own grassroots — while uprooting themselves from the province’s political soil.
Modern sex-education in our schools? Roll it back to the 20-year-old curriculum we had two years ago, say most of the leadership rivals.
A future-oriented environmental policy on global warming? Put it in the deep freeze, the candidates chorus, lest they be burned at the stake by those fiery grassroots.
Walking a tightrope between Tory party diehards and the rest of Ontario — a living, breathing, provincial body politic that grasps global warming and gets sex-ed — isn’t as hard as it sounds. In normal circumstances, it’s easy as apple pie and fruitful lies.
Winning the PC leadership last time required the ability to lead people on — telling Tories what they wanted to hear, without others overhearing. Above all, it took time — enough time after the convention for Patrick Brown to reverse himself by repudiating past promises, and long enough before the 2018 election so that his subterfuge subsided in the collective memory.
That’s how Brown defeated Christine Elliott in the 2015 leadership race — telling social conservatives (in writing) that he’d rewrite the sex-ed curriculum, boasting about his prolife credentials, flirting with opponents of gay marriage, and flitting around (on) the environment before flip-flopping after the fact.
He didn’t just buy more votes or sell more memberships. He sold members a bill of goods on sex-ed and global warming (until personally flaming out on sex scandals).
This time, Tories want a guarantee — not the People’s Guarantee that Brown produced as a campaign platform last November (no longer being honoured post-resignation) — but an ironclad commitment.
With barely two months until the start of the provincial election campaign, it’s hard to fathom a Tory leader pivoting so rapidly on key policy commitments. Elliott’s public vacillations make it clear that she doesn’t believe sex-ed should be undone and carbon should remain unpriced, but she is saying what needs to be said. With no time to perform a post-leadership, pre-election U-turn, she may be telling the truth — technically — when promising to abide by commitments she doesn’t believe in.
Rival candidate Doug Ford taunted Elliott during the last debate by asking who she was trying to fool with her new-found conservatism. In fairness to Ford, he rarely knows what he’s talking about, but at least he knows what he believes in.
Elliott knows better on policy plausibility, she just isn’t letting on. When I asked what she’d learned from losing the last two leadership contests, Elliott told me it’s all about bonding with the base — persuading by organizing and listening.
Older and wiser, wooing and winning are everything this time. That means capturing supporters not just by signing up but lining up on policies — no matter the inconsistency.
If Brown could do it, and Ford can do it, so must she. Even Caroline Mulroney has caught on to the exigencies on policies, recalibrating her carbon stance lest she fail the litmus test of Conservative orthodoxy.
And so, two years after Brown beat her badly, Elliott is the front-runner. Back then, she seemed half-hearted about the race; this time, she has the fire in her belly and appears coldblooded about the campaign.
In early 2018, belatedly confronting Brown’s character flaws, Tories realized they’d be campaigning under a leader offering the right (centreright) policies but the wrong personality. Now under Elliott, Ontario’s PCs may end up with a leader proffering the wrong (hard-right) policies but the right personality.
In 2015, Brown was the conservative, Elliott the progressive. During Brown’s short-lived attempt to recapture his lost leadership last month, the roles were reversed — he ardently defended his more progressive platform, while Elliott and the others expediently denounced it.
Most of the caucus still believed in Brown’s platform, just not Brown himself. And so his quixotic quest for vindication unravelled.
He was a rebel without a caucus. Just his own cause.
The tragedy for the Tories, and perhaps for the province, is that the party chose the wrong leader campaigning on the wrong policies in mid-2015 — but he reversed himself in good time. If the PCs vote for Elliott in early 2018, they will have finally chosen the right leader but burdened her with the wrong policies — with no time to right herself by tacking to the centre before the election.